First a disclaimer, I’m still a beginner in Japanese and I don’t want to pretend that I properly understand what I’m talking about here. It’s just something interesting that I’ve noticed while trying to understand Japanese grammar, that I hope could help other learners (or at least if I’m completely confused I will be happy to stand corrected.)
So it’s a well-known fact that Japanese is a language that heavily relies on context (like for example, how you drop the subject or the topic of the sentence whenever it can be inferred from the context). But another interesting aspect of the context-dependence of Japanese, which is less discussed I think, is how various grammatical constructions in Japanese specifically serve a contextual or pragmatic role, a phenomenon which I feel is not something you often encounter in European languages. What I mean is that often certain grammatical structures in Japanese serve the purpose of telling or indicating how the speaker and the listener are *related* to the content of what is said, rather than just specifying the content *itself*. Unlike European languages in which the purpose of grammar is usually to articulate the subject that is being talked about (or what is asked), in Japanese you often also have to grammatically indicate information such as what’s the purpose of saying what you’re saying (or asking) or how does what you’re saying (or asking) contributes to the conversation.
Here are some examples:
* The distinction between the particles “wa” and “ga”. This is a notoriously complicated subject (and I don’t pretend to fully understand what’s going on), but on one explanation that I heard, and at least on some uses, ga is used as an indicator that there is some new piece of information that you want to add to the conversation (which the listener is not expected to be aware of), while wa marks what is already shared or salient between the speaker and the audience.
* The particle “yo”. I feel like it does something similar to ga in that it serves to convey to the listener that a new piece of information is expressed which he is not expected to know, or to add an emphasis (and if I’m not mistaken, ga too can be used to emphasize one thing over another).
* The expression “no desu” or “n’desu/n’da” and their variations. Here again the purpose is to indicate to the listener that the information that is being shared is something new to them, or the fact that the speaker is asking about something which is important to him or surprises him.
* The distinction between morau and kureru. If I understand correctly, you use kureru when you want to highlight the fact that a particular person gave you the thing (and hence ga is added), while with morau the emphasis is on the fact itself that you’ve been given something (by whomever).
* When describing events that happened to you personally you ought use the passive verb form (otherwise it will sound like you are talking about yourself in third person). And more generally, it seems that in Japanese you often speak differently about yourself and things that are close to you as opposed to when speaking about other people (a well-known example is different words that are used to talk about your family members and other people’s family.)
(if you can think of other examples feel free to add, and also please let me know if I got anything wrong)
I’m pointing this outs because putting things in these terms helped me to understand what is in common between all these seemingly heterogeneous grammatical concepts and gave me a clearer idea about their function. I would even go as far as saying that all the examples above are really just variations on the same concept: namely, to focus the listener’s attention on some aspect of what’s being said (or asked).
As long as you think about Japanese grammar from the perspective of European languages (namely focusing on what the sentences are directly about) Japanese grammatical concepts can seem very confusing if not incomprehensible, but once the distinction between what is conveyed in the conversation and how the speaker and listener are related to that which is being conveyed is firmly kept in mind, everything suddenly begins to make more sense.
