[Noun]です。

A noun followed by -です is the most basic way to make a Japanese sentence. It is equivalent to the sentence “I am / you are / he/she/it is / we are / you are / they are [noun]”.

ブラウンさんです。
This is Mr. Brown.

let’s look at grammar in two ways: firstly Functional Grammar, which looks at words in terms of what they do in a sentence, and secondly, the more traditional syntax, which is concerned with the relationships between word in terms of their type.

In functional linguistics, sentences that give information have similarities in all languages: they state what is being talked about (the theme), and they give some information about it (the “rheme”). This applies to both English and Japanese.

Let’s look at these English sentences:

  • I’m cold
  • The cat sat on the mat
  • This is Mr Brown

In traditional English syntax, all all information-giving sentences must have a subject, “I”, “The cat”, and “This” which in these cases is equivalent to the functional theme. They must also have a predicate “am cold”, “sat on the mat”, and “is Mr Brown”, which must contain a verb and other optional elements .

In English syntax every clause has to have a subject and a predicate, which must contain a verb. This means that you must explicitly state the topic in every sentence. However, in Japanese, a predicate is enough to form a complete clause, and there is no syntactic necessity to state the rheme, so if it is obvious you are talking about Mr. Brown, the sentence 「ブラウンさんです。」is all you need.