Left-branching language, left-branching culture

An excursion into the relationship between grammar and culture

Did you ever get the feeling when you’re reading a Japanese paper or article, or listening to someone, that they were just going on and on and on? You know, not getting to the point? Beating around the bush? That can be really annoying to us Westerners, who want to find out up front what someone is saying.

But actually this is a perfectly valid pattern of presenting information. You give background and related information first, and then finish up with the conclusion, the core point.

The opposite approach is to present the main point first, elaborating the details later. This pattern is more typical of Western cultures.

Neither is “better”. Both have their place. And of course, people from all cultures mix both patterns all the time. But some cultures prefer one, others the other.

This is not just a matter of how the two cultures structure narratives. It’s also a matter of how they think. As usual, verbal structures and cultural structures are deeply intertwined.

We call the Japanese approach “left-branching”, borrowing a term from linguistics. Left-branching means that background and context and other information “branches” down and off to the left from the “core” argument—it comes before it.

It is not surprising, then, that Japanese grammar is left-branching. In Japanese grammar, if you are talking about something but want to qualify or describe it, you invariably put the description (modifiers) first.

大きな犬 (ookii inu); a large dog
吠えた犬 (hoeta inu): a dog that barked

In English, on the other hand, we sometimes put the description first (“large”), but sometimes last (“that barked”).

This grammatical difference between Japanese and English is something that can really throw learners for a loop. It may be one of the reasons some people think Japanese is “difficult”. You can’t just start off with 犬 and then add stuff to it afterwards; you have to start off with all the stuff about the dog before you’ve even told people you’re talking about a dog, and then and only then say 犬.

It’s a different mindset. It’s a mindset where you get all your data about something out there first, and then, finally, reveal what you are talking about. It’s a mindset where you wait until the last moment to actually say the main thing. It’s a left-branching mindset.

In grammatical terms, this main thing is called a “head”. In this case, the head is “dog”. If the head comes last, like Japanese, the language is called “left-branching”. If it comes first, like in English relative clauses, that is “right-branching”.

That’s why left-branching is also called head-final. And unsurprisingly right-branching is called head-initial.

The concept of “head” is not just relevant to noun phrases, where the “head” is the main noun in question, like “dog”. In sentences like “the dog bit the boy”, the “head”—the main thing going on—is bit. In English, the added information about the bite—who bit who, the dog, the boy—come both before and after the head (the SVO pattern). But in Japanese, once again, the head always comes in the final position: 犬が少年を噛んだ (inu ga shōnen wo kanda, dog-subj boy-obj bit, the SOV pattern). In fact, Japanese is one of the most purely head-first, left-branching languages on earth.

Even prepositional phrases involve heads. In a phrase like “on the table”, the main thing is not the table, it’s the “being on”. The table is like an “object” of the “on-ness”. So in this phrase in English, once again the head comes before the additional information (head-initial, right-branching). In Japanese, we have テーブルの上 (te-buru no ue). Again, the head (上) comes last (head-final, left-branching).

The term left-branching comes from how it looks when you diagram a sentence, like maybe you did in high school, into a parse tree that represents the sentence structure. In left-branching languages like Japanese, the parse tree grows down to the left. That’s because the modifiers come before the head, and hence the structure grows leftward. The deeper the sentence structure, the more it expands leftward before reaching the final head. Right-branching languages are the opposite.

We see the head-final nature of Japanese everywhere we look. For example, the negative construct ない can be considered a head—the “main point” is the “not-ness”—and it comes at the end, head-final. You can say a bunch of stuff and then right at the end make it negative! You can say a bunch of stuff and then right at the end make it hypothetical: いったとすれば (assuming I had gone). You can say a bunch of stuff and then right at the end make it past tense! You can say a bunch of stuff and then right at the end make the whole thing desiderative with たい (tai), “I wanted to do that”. You can say a bunch of stuff and then right at the end mark it as something you thought (と思った, to omotta).

Head-finality is not just a feature of Japanese grammar, or narrative structure, but of basic Japanese thought patterns and decision making. Japan is famous for its laborious, extended decision making process, gathering and processing information before making a decision. That is head-final decision making!

For us Westerners operating in Japanese contexts, we need to learn to structure our communications in more left-branching, head-final ways for greater effectiveness and impact. We need to better accept and process the left-branching aspects and head-finality we see in everything from grammar to narrative structures to thought processes.

Today’s fun factoid: Turkish is another example of an almost purely head-final language in terms of its grammar.