Position of は relative to other particles


So I've had a feeling for a while regarding particle order, which I haven't
managed to find much of anything to either confirm or deny in any of the
learning resources I've tried, and I'm hoping someone here can tell me whether
it's actually true or I'm just imagining things.

It is generally taught that the order of particles in Japanese sentences is
(usually) grammatically not that important (there are conventions, of course,
and different placement may result in slightly different emphasis, but the
overall meaning is still the same even if you, for example, change whether the
を part or the に part comes first or second, etc). However, I have had the
impression for a while now that that may be not entirely true of は (the topic
particle)?

Specifically, to borrow a math/CS term, it feels to me like は has a slightly
lower "operator precedence" than most of the others, which is part of why it
commonly comes first. For example (off the top of my head, so it might not be
the best one):

  * 人は公園で歩いている -- "The person is walking in the park" (The topic is "the person" and the action is "walking in the park") 
  * 公園で人は歩いている -- "In the park, the person is walking" (The topic is "the person (in the context of being in the park)" and the action is "walking")

(I know that "in the park, the person" might actually usually be said
differently (公園では, etc), but my point is that even without that the placement
of 公園で before a later は changes a bit (the feel, at least, of) what it applies
to)

That is, it seems to me that if other particles, such as で or に are put
_before_ は, they can end up essentially modifying the topic, instead of the
sentence as a whole, so effectively, は can sometimes have a
grouping/partitioning effect on things that come before it (not always, but
sometimes), which isn't true of other particles.

In most cases, the effect is not really substantial (it often ends up coming
out with the same meaning in the end), but in some cases it seems like it
could potentially change the nuance of things noticeably, so I'm curious. Am I
completely off base with this? Does は actually work differently than other
particles in this regard?

**Edit:** So my example above was bad in a few ways, I guess. Here's one I
came across recently, though I'm not sure it exemplifies what I'm talking
about quite as strongly:

> この近所にコンビニはありますか？

It seems to me that the normal way to phrase this would be 「コンビニはこの近所にありますか」
("As for convenience stores, is there one in this neighborhood?"), but by
placing 「この近所に」 in front of 「コンビニは」, this has an effect of essentially making
it feel more like "As for convenience stores in this neighborhood, is there
one?" (that is, "in this neighborhood" becomes more tightly associated with
"convenience stores" and essentially serves to help refine the scope of the
topic). In this particular case, one could argue that the two questions end up
asking essentially the same thing, but I suspect that wouldn't always be the
case in all sentences, which is why I'm curious about this sort of thing.




First of all, 人は公園で歩いている sounds unnatural. To match the English translation,
you should say **その** 人は公園 **を** 歩いている. See
[this](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/3243/5010) for this を.

Second, despite your observation, その人は公園を歩いている and 公園をその人は歩いている have the same
basic meaning, although the latter is a little unusual and thus sounds like 公園
is emphasized. In both sentences, 公園を adverbially modifies 歩いている, not (その)人.
As a basic rule, ～を/～で on its own cannot modify a noun in the first place.
See: [using の with と,で, から,
まで](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/33605/5010)

If you want to say "The person in the park is walking", it's 公園にいる人は歩いている in
Japanese.

In conclusion, I was not able to get what you mean by "grouping". If you have
a better example that explains your problem, I'll take a look again.

