Is this a stylistic thing or just random?

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - Printable Version

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Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - john555 - 2015-06-07

I'm reading a short story by Haruki Murakami and I noticed on the same page he uses a kanji (来) in one place but in another sentence spells it out in kana (きた):

Sentence 1: “。。。私はここにプロポーズに来たですよ。”

Sentence 2: “ずっと深い深いところからざわざわここまで這い上がってきたですよ。”

(context: the speaker of the two sentences is a green monster who climbed out of the ground in a woman's garden and is now speaking to her).

Thanks!

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - EratiK - 2015-06-07

For me the second one is the auxiliary (come about, grow, come to, begin to). See DOBJG p221.

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - yudantaiteki - 2015-06-07

Yep. I may have already explained this to you in another thread actually.

The term "auxiliary verb" is kind of vague and not well defined -- what is meant here are verbs that follow て forms (for the most part) and have meanings that not just the basic meaning of the verb.

(You might feel like くる is just the basic "come" meaning here but it's more grammaticalized -- certain verbs and phrases require or often occur with additional movement verbs that you might not expect from a literal English translation, like 歩いてきた or 送ってきた. 上がる is one such verb; my impression is that something popping up or crawling out of the ground will usually be described with てきた rather than just the plain verb.)

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - CureDolly - 2015-06-07

English uses auxiliary verbs quite a lot too. It is also fond of prepositions as auxiliaries to verbs, which sometimes enhance the verb and sometimes change its meaning.

heat, heat up
Look, look up, look out, look on, look in on, look over
make, make up, make out, make over
speak, speak out, speak up

Actually I would say on the whole Japanese auxiliaries tend to be a little more regular and less unguessable than English ones. I mean, who would guess that throwing out yesterday's dinner and throwing up yesterday's dinner would have such radically different meanings?

I only mention this because people often find it easier to process Japanese when they see that it is actually doing something they have seen before, even if a bit differently.

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - EratiK - 2015-06-07

@yudan
Ah, except I really meant the inchoative auxiliary, you seem to suggest the auxiliary here functions like a preposition in an English prepositional verb. The two meanings probably have a common border, mind.

@CureDolly
You can't call English particle verbs "auxiliaries" by the way, it's confusing. Auxiliaries in English are be/do/have/may/should...

I'm saying that because some verbs in Japanese strongly remind me of particle verbs, and they have nothing to do with auxiliaries, for example 掛ける to hang/put/hold, but 仕掛ける to lay/set/challenge. But that said verbs like 仕掛ける seems less numerous than "dual verbs" (I don't know the exact name) like 這い上がる so I can understand your intuition to relate these to particle verbs. But I would hesitate to do so because like you said the meaning is clear, while the meaning can be unpredictable in particle verbs. I guess in English they would have their own sub-category in phrasal verbs, I can't think of a proper example, hit-and-run maybe?

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - CureDolly - 2015-06-07

I am afraid I am not very well up in grammatical terminology. I'm just a dumb-doll immersionist. I really just meant that something gets stuck onto verbs to enhance or change (direct, refine) their meaning.

I realize that prepositions are not auxiliary verbs. They aren't even verbs, after all. But they do work rather more like Japanese auxiliary verbs I think. You pop something on the end to give a nuance to the verb. And like auxiliary くる, いく, でる etc, they do tend to be literally or figuratively directional.

I find it is often helpful to show how something works rather like something one already knows even if the analogy isn't exact.

It is quite odd, I think that English insists on the (actual, I think) auxiliary verb "do" in question forms like:

Do you want a drink?

What did you do with it?

When every other West European language I know about says (as indeed older English did):

Want you a drink?

What did you with it?

It seems a particularly useless and clumsy auxiliary usage, I think. Like the language growing an extra thumb on the back of its hand.

But I digress...

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - jimeux - 2015-06-07

CureDolly Wrote:I realize that prepositions are not auxiliary verbs. They aren't even verbs, after all. But they do work rather more like Japanese auxiliary verbs I think. You pop something on the end to give a nuance to the verb. And like auxiliary くる, いく, でる etc, they do tend to be literally or figuratively directional.

I find it is often helpful to show how something works rather like something one already knows even if the analogy isn't exact.

I think phrasal verbs correspond more closely to compound verbs in Japanese. There are cases like 取り出す that are easily understandable, like its equivalent 'take out', but other times the verb/particle gives you no indication of the meaning and it's easier to think of the words as a single unit. I tend to look up the meaning of compound verbs as a rule because of this. I remember being surprised by 垂れ込む recently. I'm pretty sure this idea is discussed in DOBJG somewhere.

Actually, Wiki pretty much explains the difference in its Compound Verbs article. It's in the grammaticalisation aspect that Yudantaiteki mentioned. I also came across this compound verb database website while looking up that article

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - CureDolly - 2015-06-07

Yes. It think the same is true of verb preposition compounds in English. For example "throw in" is perfectly obvious and guessable, "throw out" is somewhat less so, when it is used in the sense of 捨てる, and "throw up" while it can't be called a word because of the way English is written (in German it would be a word) is essentially a meaning-compound of its own with a special sense that could hardly be guessed if you didn't know it. As you say, it needs to be regarded as a single unit.

In some cases these verb-preposition compounds are directly comparable to Japanese auxiliary verbs. For example, "-up" can mean "do thoroughly" just like Japanese ~切る as in "eat up". The fact that they are directional, like 〜くる, 〜いく, 〜でる is also a close analogy.

I wasn't really trying to say anything about grammar in a technical sense. I was really just saying "actually popping something (often a positional or directional something) on the end of a verb to change its nuance isn't as complicated and foreign as it might seem. We do it all the time in English."

Is this a stylistic thing or just random? - erlog - 2015-06-08

EratiK Wrote:For me the second one is the auxiliary (come about, grow, come to, begin to). See DOBJG p221.

This is correct, and in written Japanese the kanji for auxiliary verbs is usually dropped. Basically, whenever a verb is used to form a grammatical construction rather than for it's literal meaning you probably shouldn't use the kanji. So cases like ～てくる、～ていく、ていただく, etc. Most often, only the kanji for the base verb itself is used.

There are cases of compound verbs where there is more than one kanji in the verb, but compound verbs a different thing than auxiliary verbs. Compound verbs come as a set whereas auxiliary verbs can be attached to any verb in order to modify their meaning in some way.

If you're having trouble telling the difference then a good rule of thumb is that if the "verb phrase" you're thinking of is listed as a separate word by itself in a dictionary then it's a compound verb, and therefore all the kanji that make that word up should be written. If the "verb phrase" is not in the dictionary as a verb by itself then it's probably a base verb with an auxiliary verb attached, and in that case only the kanji for the base verb should be written.