Copula, Topic, and "Pronominal Drop"

[Go Back Home]

“(My) specialty is the Japanese language.”

Key 1: "am/is/are" in "[vp [v am/is/are] [Noun]]" in English as in "John is a student" -> desu （です）; de arimasu（で　あります）
1)       -desu.
    Verb should always be at the end of the clause in Japanese.
    [As we learn later, the content of /u/ as in /desu/ is Non-perfect.]
2) nihongo -desu.
The "copula" verb /desu/takes noun, and the predicative noun occurs immediately before the verb /desu/.
The verb /nihongo-desu/ ‘is the Japanese language’ need subject, which can be explicit or implicit. Suppose you are talking about your specialty. In addition, you want to make the topic explicitly expressed in the sentence since there are many other possible topics in the context of utterance.
Key 2: The topic form /wa/ takes noun, and the topic form immediately follows the noun. The topic-marked noun functions as the topic of the sentence or utterance as a whole. The topic-marked noun grammatically functions as subject or object of the verb that the topic phrase modifies as well.

Key 3: Every modifying phrase occurs before the modified form in Japanese.

3) senmon-wa  nihongo -desu.
せんもんは　にほんごです。
Key 4: You can make the subject (as well as the object if any) of a verb implicit, i.e., not expressing it overtly in the sentence, letting the hearer guess from the context.
4)    nihongo-desu.
    にほんごです。