Grammatical particle

In grammar the term particle has two different meanings.

Traditional meaning

A particle is a part of speech which cannot be inflected, that is it can be neither declined nor conjugated. Particles are the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction and the interjection.

Modern meaning

In modern grammar, a particle is a function word that must be associated with another word or phrase to impart meaning, i.e., does not have its own lexical definition. On this definition, particles are a separate part of speech and are distinct from other classes of function words, such as articles, prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs.

Particles are typically words that encode grammatical categories (such as negation, mood, tense, or case), clitics, or fillers or (oral) discourse markers such as well, um, etc.

Particles are never inflected.

Languages vary widely in how much they use particles, some using them extensively and others more commonly using alternative devices such as prefixes/suffixes, inflection, auxiliary verbs and word order.

Japanese

Japanese may refer to:

See also

From Zero

From Zero was a nu metal band from Chicago, Illinois.

History

Formed in 1998, From Zero's music is distinguished from many earlier nu metal groups with its greater focus on vocal harmonies, and correspondingly fewer elements of hip-hop than groups such as Limp Bizkit.

In 1999, the band independently released their self-titled EP (referred to as "The Green Album"). At this time, they were also opening for bands such as Amen, Disturbed, Nickelback and Nothingface.

They later signed with Arista Records, where they released two major label albums in One Nation Under (which features many re-recorded songs from their self-titled album) (2001) and My So-Called Life (2003). They had two music videos which are for their songs "Check Ya" and "Smack", both of which can be viewed over on YouTube. Before the recording of My So-Called Life, bassist Rob Ruccia left the band to do production work on other bands, leaving vocalist Jett to record the bass for the album. They later recruited Avi Kopernik to play bass for the group's live shows.

Japanese language

Japanese (日本語, Nihongo, [nihõŋɡo] or [nihõŋŋo]) is an East Asian language spoken by about 125 million speakers, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family, whose relation to other language groups, particularly to Korean and the suggested Altaic language family, is debated.

Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial texts did not appear until the 8th century. During the Heian period (794–1185), Chinese had considerable influence on the vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) saw changes in features that brought it closer to the modern language, as well as the first appearance of European loanwords. The standard dialect moved from the Kansai region to the Edo (modern Tokyo) region in the Early Modern Japanese period (early 17th century–mid-19th century). Following the end in 1853 of Japan's self-imposed isolation, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly. English loanwords in particular have become frequent, and Japanese words from English roots have proliferated.

Japanese grammar

Japanese has a regular agglutinative subject-object-verb (SOV) morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. In language typology, it has many features divergent from most European languages. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. There are many such languages, but few in Europe. It is a topic-prominent language.

Some distinctive aspects of modern Japanese sentence structure

Word order: head final and left branching

The modern theory of constituent order ("word order"), usually attributed to Joseph Greenberg, identifies several kinds of phrase. Each one has a head and possibly a modifier. The head of a phrase either precedes its modifier (head initial) or follows it (head final). Some of these phrase types, with the head marked in boldface, are: