-te form multi part sentences could be a problem, doesnt it?

[jpd1]

hello again everyone,

a new concept/question i have today is:

i learned that to make sentences that are compiled from more than one verb, for example:
"i went to school, drank cola and watched TV"
you need to make only the last verb in past tense and the previous verbs in Te form.

like:
"Gakkou ni itte, cola wo nonde, Terebi wo mimashta" (if there's a particle mistake here, please let me know)
now if you were to listen to this in spoken language, you could interpret it as:
"Go to school!, Drink Cola!..." and then "Watched TV"

("Gakkou ni itte!" , "Cola wo nonde!" , "TV wo mimashta")

do you not agree?
i guess that if he finishes the sentence then you might understand he is talking about himself and things he did because it's in the same "breath" of words, but:

what happens in Japanese if someone don't complete his sentence?
like if he get cut in the middle of the sentence?

unlike in English you can understand the first part of the sentence almost to 99% certainty, but can you do the same in Japanese?

sorry for the long post, hopefully someone can help me on this.

thank you very much.

[Jessi]

You are right - without any other context, if the speaker got cut off in the middle of the sentence you might not know what they were ultimately trying to say. The last verb could be in the past (meaning they did all of those things), the nonpast (meaning they do/will do those things), or it could even be in the -tai form (meaning they want to do all of those things), and so on. I think in a lot of cases, though, there should be some kind of context that gives you clues as to what the speaker means before they completely finish their sentence - like a prefacing question ("What did you do yesterday?" "Oh, I... blah blah blah") or a time expression (today, tomoroow).

[Drabant]

In this case, wouldn't you hear on the tone of voice used, if it's a command or not? In English, you don't say "drink cola" with the same tone of voice when you say "Drink cola!", or "Please drink cola", or "I like to drink cola."

And cutting sentences in the middle could give a different meaning in English as well, though perhaps not as frequent. Imagine a line of swimmers about to start a race. And you casually trying to say "I like to read books and swim", but getting interrupted after "books". Perhaps they will see "aaand swim" as their cue to start swimming.