Portal:Language/Language topic/April 2007

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The grammar of the Japanese language has a highly regular agglutinative verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. Typologically, its most prominent feature is topic creation: Japanese is neither topic-prominent, nor subject-prominent; indeed, it is common for sentences to have distinct topics and subjects. Grammatically, Japanese is an SOV dependent-marking language, with verbs always constrained to the sentence-final position, except in some rhetorical and poetic usage. The word order is fairly free as long as the order of dependent-head is maintained among all constituents: the modifier or relative clause precedes the modified noun, the adverb precedes the modified verb, the genitive nominal precedes the possessed nominal, and so forth. Thus, Japanese is a strongly left-branching language; to contrast, Romance languages like Spanish are strongly right-branching, and Germanic languages like English are weakly right-branching. Find out more...