new expressions

P&T notes – assigning sets

Besides the role of の as the casual question marker, we usually learn の as the possessive marker. This is an oversimplification because often ‘s is not a possessive, e.g., “it’s” and “she’s” are contractions of “it is” and “she is”; and often a possessive doesn’t have a marker, e.g., we say “Google webpage button” instead of “Google’s webpage’s button” and, very often, の is not representing a possessive but a more general set membership, as in half of the exaples below. Considering that “usually” we can translate の to English as either ‘s and “of”, we have:

We can translate the Japanese 「<noun A>の<noun B>」 into either “<noun A>‘s<noun B>” or “<noun B> of <noun A>” in English. For example, in the pairs of sentences above, the first one is a possessive, e.g., John owns a car, Mary owns a house, Japan owns an island, and SONY owns a studio; while the second one is not, e.g., John doesn’t own a train but uses one to go to work, Mary doesn’t own a school but attends one, Japan doesn’t own a car but it’s its location of manufacturing, and SONY does not own Mr. Tanaka but employees him. As for the actual possessives, sometimes the final English translation approximates better the ‘s version (e.g., John’s car, Mary’s house) while some other times, it approximates better the ‘of’ version (studio of SONY), and sometimes neither (Japanese island).

However, our point is that whether の indicates a possessive or not, の always indicates a set membership, i.e., AのB always means that B is from a set of A. The possessive case is simply when the set is that of “belongings’. For example, let’s rephrase the above sentences using this premise:

In all cases above, possessive or not, の indicates membership on a set. The set should be obvious from context. For example, if our assumption is that John owns a car, then “John’s car” says that the car is in the set of John’s belongings; if our assumption is that John doesn’t own a train, then “John’s train” says that the train is in the set of John’s forms of transportation. This approach to describe の makes it very easy to explain that when Mr. Tanaka introduces himself as 「SONYの田中」です, he is not saying that he belongs to SONY (as a possessive), but that he is in the set of SONY’s employees (as a set membership).

Ambiguities

All language is ambiguous if the context permits it. For example, what would we mean by “Jeff’s newspaper”? We probably mean the newsaper that Jeff bought, but if this “Jeff” happens to be Jeff Bezos then, depending on the context, we might mean The Washington Post entire organization, which Jeff Bezos owns; there is no way to tell them appart other than context, because both are “the newspaper from the set of Jeff (?)”, but out of context we don’t know whether the set “(?)” is “(belongings)” or “(company aquisitions)”.

There are some compund words that contain の; for example, when we treat 男の子 as a compund word, it means “child from the set of males”, or “boy”, but if we treat is as a possessive, it means “child from the set of the male (belongings)”, or “the male’s child”. Thus, まことは男の子だ might mean “Makoto is a boy” (we are designating Makoto’s gender), or it might mean “Makoto is the man’s child” (we are designating Makoto’s parent); “Makoto” is a name that applies to both genders, like “Chris” in English, so in this last case we wouldn’t know Makoto’s gender.

Compound words that contain の also follow the interpretation of の as a member of a set, e.g.,

Thus, compound words that we contain の can often lead to multiple interpretations, and we need to use contex to disambiguate them.

の units

Normaly a particle forms an unbreakable unit with the phrase that precedes it, like in “(to Japan)” or “(日本に)”; however, の is special because it forms an unbreakabe unit with both the phrase that precedes it and the one that follows it, e.g., “(まりこの車)” is a single unit.

However, sometimes we use the possessive ‘s by attaching it only to the owner. For example, “Mariko’s car” and “Mariko’s” are the same thing if we know, from context, that we are taking about cars, e.g., “Mariko’s” is short for “Mariko’s {one}” where “{one}” is implicit and we don’t need to write it down explicitly because we can infer it from context, i.e., “{one}” is “{car}”.

In Japanese, “Mariko’s” would be 「まりこの」. In this case, same as in English, の explicitly forms a unit only with the phrase that names the owner. In reality, we are still forming a unit with both phrases, with one of the item being explicit and the other implicit, e.g., “Mariko’s {one}”, which is the same as “Mariko’s {car}” or 「まりこの{車}」.

Here are a couple examples:

In the first case, the implicit set “{one}” has to be something like “child”, “person”, or “girl”, because they are talking about peaople, while in the second case, the implicit set “{one}” is “city” because Yokohama is a city:

The discussion in the last line is that Yokohama is certainly not “located in” Tokyo, but is barely 20 miles away, and the space between them is urbanized. Tokyo is so large that people tend to think of Yokohama as “in” of Tokyo; however, the population of Yokohama is 4M vs. 40M of Tokyo. In essence, in spite of Tokyo having 10 times the population of Yokohama, Yokohama is a huge city in its own right; actually, it’s the largest city in Japan after Tokyo; the only U.S. city with more people than Yokohama is New York, with 8M. Hence, simply bundling a city of the size of Yokohama as being “in” Tokyo is not “exactly” correct; just like Makoto replied to Chinatsu: “close, but no cigar”.

more about belonging to a set

The possessive nature of の comes from a more general case. A better way to think of まりこの車 is as “the car from the set of Mariko’s belongings”. This form also covers the end-of-phrase possession because “まりこの” becomes “the one from the set of Mariko’s belongings”. This also explains why we can say “赤いの” to mean “the red one” (or “the one from the set of red things”) or “日本の” to mean “the Japanese one” (or “the one from the set of things made in Japan”). Neither of the last two examples use の to indicate possession, because neither “red” nor “Japan” own the items in question; instead, we are saying that the items are from those particular sets, with no possession implied.

Since the “possessive の” is a subset of the “from-the-set の”, then we can generalize the possessive situations described above: の forming a unit with both the set and the item, like in 日本の車 (a car from the set of things manufactured in Japan); and の forming a unit with only the set that it belongs to, like in 日本の (the one from the set of things manufactured in Japan).

As an example, Makoto tells Kei that her getting lost all the time is an old story not worth mentioning:

Clearly の is not marking a possessive because むかし (old, ancient) is an adjective, not a noun, so it can’t possess anything; however, むかし is the set of old things so, for example,

chaining

A series of “from a set” relationships create large units. For example, “My friend Tanaka san who is an engineer at SONY” would be “SONY’s engineer’s I’s friend’s Tanaka san” or SONYのエンジニアのわたしのともだちの田中さん. Let’s see… this is “Mr. Tanaka, from the set of people that are friends, from the set of items that are mine, from the set of people that are engineers, from the set of people that are employed SONY”.

These long chains are confusing to the Japanese in the same way that a sentence like ‘the puppy of the dog of the sister of the mother of the friend of my teacher’ is grammatically correct but still is confusing to us, so we won’t find them very often.

As an example, Kei introduces Nao to Makoto as the daughter of the family that owns the liquor store they are standing in front of. The anime simplifies the introduction to a chain of two のs from the original manga intro, on the right, that has a chain of three のs:

Of course, the sentence is not exactly correct as liquor stores cannot have daughters, but it is understood that Kei is refering to the family that owns the store; this is similar to saying that “Socks, the cat”, was the White house pet during the Clinton administration, e.g., it is clear that we are actually saying that Socks was the pet of the family that lived in The White House, instead of the pet of The White House itself.