99434
Let's take the following sentence as an example:

> 八時に家を出ます。  
>  I leave home at eight o'clock.

に and を are usually called particles. But に for example looks like "at"
(preposition) that follows 八時, not precedes. Which makes me think that at
least some Japanese particles may be called postpositions. I'm not exactly a
linguist to know the difference/relationship between particles and
postpositions. But can at least some Japanese particles be called
postpositions? Or maybe all Japanese particles are postpositions because they
all follow words (as far as I can tell)?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-04-23T05:02:21.530
99431
2023-04-24T20:59:10.827
2023-04-24T20:59:10.827
5229
18894
question
grammar particles linguistics comparative-linguistics
Does Japanese have postpositions?
Linguistic terminology for Japanese is simply not fixed. So you can find
(proper printed) books (PPB) saying Japanese has zero, one, or two sorts of
adjective, for example. (Wikipedia says three, but it isn't a PPB.)

"Postposition" is a pretty standard term for any sort of "functor" word coming
after (or, equivalently, forming the end of) a noun phrase. So particularly
when this "functor" word closely resembles a preposition (in English for
example) except for its position, then it is very hard to see how you could
object to calling it a "postposition". In particular, ～から and ～へ ("to" and
"from"). Equally, the particles sometimes called "case particles" (が for
nominative, を for accusative, に for dative) can also be called postpositions.
FWIW, Wikipedia simply says "postpositions, also called particles".

So the answer could be that there is no clear meaning to the question. But it
could also be (if you are really asking "how does Japanese grammar work") to
say that, yes, all functor words in Japanese come after the phrase they
modify, because Japanese is relentlessly left-branching. If a verb has two
arguments (e.g. the verb to read in "He read [1]his daughter [2]a book") then
each argument will be followed by a particle, which forms a "hook" showing how
the argument. So [1] is 'musume-ni', where 'ni' indicates "dative", and [2] is
'hon-wo', where 'wo' indicates "accusative".

My terminology is likely not to be the same as anyone else's, and romanisation
is intended to clarify rather than to follow a particular standard (e.g. I
distinguish the accusative を as 'wo', but it is usually transcribed 'o').
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-04-23T16:39:27.827
99434
2023-04-23T16:39:27.827
35531
99431
answer