So I was reading this article:
[https://8020japanese.com/wa-vs-ga/](https://8020japanese.com/wa-vs-ga/)
Its a very good article. I also admit that I can’t say I read all of it. But I skimmed enough of it to formulate a question. From what I read, it seems は is used as a way to add things into an evolving pile of context. But in some of the diagrams, it showed that there were some words that could be added to the context pile without using the は particle. In the following sentence:
たろう は きょう なに を しましたか？ || 太郎は今日何をしましたか？
The words that are shown as in the context pile are 太郎 and 今日. But my question is this:
If both of those are meant to be context details, why don’t they both get a は particle? For example:
たろう***は*** きょう***は*** なに を しましたか？ || 太郎***は*** 今日***は*** 何をしましたか？
an even bigger example:
たろう***は*** きょう***は*** ほんや***には*** なに を しましたか？ || 太郎 **は** 今日 **は** 本屋 **には** 何をしましたか？
I suppose I can understand why は isn’t used all the time, but (specifically if I’m speaking in a formal and logical way) how would I be supposed to know which words *could* but don’t necessarily explicitly have a context marker like は? And how am I as a writer/speaker meant to know when its ok to omit it?
2 comments
I mean は and がhave some explicitly use cases. Sometimes they are interchangeable and it will stay correct, but many times they aren’t.
In the final example sentence you gave, you don’t have to use two of the は‘s
太郎は今日本屋で何をしましたか？is totally fine.
You can use は in the other two places, but then it sounds like you’re comparing them to something. The biggest use case of は in my opinion is to compare to things. The reason I consider it the biggest is because in casual speech, you will almost always omit は or replace it with って, unless you are explicitly comparing things.
So in the sentence you gave, it sounds like you are having a conversation where tarou mentioned some other things, and you really want to emphasize that you’re asking him about today and the bookstore. Tbh, it’s a very unlikely sentence to come up, because it’s be weird to compare a bookstore to something and today to another day in the same sentence, but it’s grammatically possible. I would say unless you have an explicit reason to use は, though, don’t use it. It has a couple of use cases, but the most common are subject marker and comparisons. 太郎はis a subject marketは where you are asking tarou about something, the other two sound like you are adding comparison.
It’s quite interesting question. For sure, we can make it simple as “topic is about what you want to talk generally (preferable several sentences in a row)”, but it doesn’t explain all it’s working at all. It seems that we have a type of scale.
If we cut our sentence and only deliver new information like “went to a shop”, then time/place/manner and similar details still wouldn’t clarify it. We can say “today in a hurry went to a shop from a home” and it’s still completely ambiguous about who we talk. Thus despite serving a similar idea, to add more details, topic does so in much stronger way.
It’s quite important to mention that it’s not only about subjects. Subjects are very common candidates for a topic, but there are 4 possible topic locations in a sentence.
* Explicitly stated with は.
* Implicit は, either obvious or omitted in context.
* Predicate.
* Occurrence (for actions only, or better to say one-time events).
Look at some sentence like “I will clean the kitchen”. Such sentence can be talking about “I”, but also about predicate like “Who will clean it?”. Similarly occurrence topic is when we focus not on action itself, but it’s occurrence (and possible consequences). Like “careful, brick is falling”. We aren’t really interested in what the brick did today, it’s important here for people to step back and not get hurt. News and similar stuff is the same, it’s interesting and useful for people to know what is going on.
Thus even if we mention our subject, it still might be ambiguous about what we want to talk. Look at the previous example “I will clean the kitchen”, what if our topic is occurrence? What if cleaning for someone is so rare and absurd action that it’s occurrence is news by itself and people will share such happening. You can notice that the idea of topic isn’t really about clarifying our subject or some other details, but about clarifying our goal, about what we want to talk.