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もしたくさんの遺産があったとしたらどのように使うのですか？

Say if it so happened that you had a lot of inheritance, how would you use it?

I was under the impression that と is a logical particle, meaning it is a particle placed after nouns to indicate grammatical relationships with other nouns. But here, と is being placed after a clause/non-noun (あった).

Question: Is there an implicit の[こと] being dropped before the と here? Or is と not considered a logical particle?

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    You've never come across the conditional と or the quotative と, neither of which have to come after a noun? There is nothing missing. Xとしたら simply means "if we suppose that X".
    – user3856370
    Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 16:59
  • @user3856370: I have, but I just thought that was a different と. If it's not, that's an interesting point :)
    – George
    Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 17:20
  • To be honest I'm not sure which と this one is, but I'm pretty sure it's not the conjunctive one that you seem to be referencing. I just treat it as a separate particle. I guess it would be interesting to know if it is actually the quote particle in disguise.
    – user3856370
    Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 17:27
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    I think としたら is generally considered to be its own separate particle by most people, and not really broken down any further. However, if you were to break it down, I believe this is really just a case of the quotative と, essentially taking the previous phrase and labelling it as the referent for the following したら (conditional/hypothetical form of する). ("this thing I just said (と), if it were to happen (したら)")
    – Foogod
    Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 19:19
  • Hi George, are you referring to the logical vs non-logical particles discussed here? learnjapaneseonline.info/2017/05/24/japanese-particles-wa-vs-ga
    – rebuuilt
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 8:06

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I'm not sure what you mean by "(non-)logical particle", but this と is essentially a quotative-と, which naturally takes a clause that ends with a verb (見たと思います), an adjective (赤いと思います) or a copula (学生だと思います). This する is a verb meaning "to let/assume" (see the 5th definition on jisho), and sentence + とする is a set phrase meaning "assume that ～". There is no fundamental grammatical difference between 遺産があったと思う and 遺産があったとする.

と can directly take a noun, too, in which case it's a different type of particle that typically means "with ～" (as in 彼と働く "to work with him") or "and" (as in リンゴとバナナ "apples and bananas"). Let's not mix them.

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