noun adjective grammar

Question

学校の窓ガラスを割った生徒に反省文を書かせました。 in this phrase why did we use two を particles, does it mean two objects are here ?? can anyone explan the sentence structure..any similar examples also

Answer 1

学校の窓ガラスを割った生徒に反省文を書かせました

The key grammar point you are looking for is "relative clause".

The main sentence here is:

生徒に反省文を書かせました
He/she/the teacher made the student write an apology

We can describe what kind of student it was with a relative clause (the part in bold):

学校の窓ガラスを割った生徒
The student who broke the school's window

The whole relative clause acts like an adjective to describe the noun (生徒) that comes after it.

I won't go into any further detail because now you know the name of it you should be able to find entire lessons on the subject.

Answer 2

You aren't wrong that there are two objects marked by を, but there are also two verbs, 割った and 書かせました. This should give you a clue that the sentence is complex in some sense. The reason is that the first part of your sentence is a noun phrase (a relative clause).

Looking at this example, it is the noun 生徒 that is being modified to give you a more complex sentence. All that is in the round brackets below is essentially one concept.

(学校の窓ガラスを割った生徒) に反省文を書かせました。

[I/they] made (the pupil who broke the school's windowpane) write a written apology.

As you can see, when you have noun phrases like this, with a verb appended to the noun, it usually translates in English as Noun + {where / what / who / that / which} + (remaining information).

Note that, often, these clauses will themselves have a subject (usually marked by が or の, though not always, see footnote if you wish!), which will change who/what is 'doing' the verb. For example, unlike in your example, where the pupil broke the window, here it is the girl that wore the dress:

(彼女が昨日、着ていたドレス)は、素敵{すてき}でした。

(The dress that the girl wore yesterday) was lovely.

Given you are unfamiliar with this sort of construction, my advice would be to try and declutter the sentence first: find the "simple" version of the sentence, before working up to the "complex" one. The simple sentence here would be:

生徒に反省文を書かせました。

(I/they) made the pupil write a written apology.

Then you can tackle the question: what sort of 生徒 was is? Ah, it was a 学校の窓ガラスを割った生徒.

I would also suggest you look at Tae Kim's post, and Maggie Sensei's post on these subjects. They provide plenty of examples sentences. Hopefully that helps!

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Footnote:

This is a slightly more advanced grammar point that I should add, for completeness, so feel free not to read this... Japanese is a language where you also -- quite commonly -- have something called a "gapless relative clause", which is a phenomenon we just do not have in English... In such phrases, you must infer the subject of a noun phrase. For example, 痩せる薬 means "diet medicine" (i.e. medicine that, if I take it, I will lose weight), not medicine which itself loses weight. The latter would be the simple grammatical translation based on the rules above, but it obviously does not make sense... Similarly, 寿司{すし}を作った人 is not necessarily easy to translate without context. It could mean either a) "the person who made the sushi", or b) "the person whom (??) made sushi for", where (??) would be clear from either preceding linguistic or non-linguistic context. I wouldn't worry about this right now, but do bear it in mind if you come across something that doesn't make much sense according to the clearer rules above!

Answer 3

割った

This Japanese trick is called [attributive verb]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb

When you start learning Japanese, they tell you that verb always must the at the last position and is used as predicate only. But learning Japanese language deeper it turns out, that their verbs can easily be used as attributives.

彼は窓ガラスを割った。
literally: He window glass broke.
verb as predicate

彼が割った窓ガラスだ。
literally: (This) by him broken window glass is.
verb as attribute