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Is this sentence correct? - Thora - 2011-02-18
Quote:So...if it's possible, maybe we could wrap up this thread by trying to clarify that more specific issue?I don't want to impose on Magamo too much, so this question is also to anyone (or their spouse
). Is this sentence okay? [edit: with the added を.]セリフがたまに日本語だったりしてヒーローズを聞いてて面白いよ
Related background stuff:
Magamo Wrote:The most important thing is that ヒーローズ in [my] three examples (and the one given by Taurus's wife) isn't the direct object of the verb 聞く. So claiming that it's ungrammatical because 聞く can't take TV is wrong in the first place. In those Japanese sentences, 聞く isn't taking a direct object.Is this meant to imply that it wouldn't be okay for 聞く to have ヒーローズ as it's direct object? 4 non-native sentences used ヒーローズを聞く. The native sentences used ヒーローズ（は） or ヒーローズで.
As I mentioned, I didn't get the sense an inadequate understanding of topic use was behind the 聞く ｖｓ 見る issue. Iryoku had no objection to 聞く in #1, so presumably they didn't take ヒーローズ topic as the direct object (though grammatically it could be both.)
#1 ヒーローズって登場人物が時々日本語しゃべってて、聞いてて面白い
Whereas in #2, Iryoku preferred 見る, so perhaps they felt that ヒーローズ in this position was likely to be interpreted as a direct object - even if it were marked は. (I'm speculating here.)
#2 セリフがたまに日本語だったりしてヒーローズ聞いてて面白いよ
In both, I think we're saying the implied direct object here is the Japanese dialogue. It isn't needed b/c it's obvious. You have emphasized that the topic ヒーローズ is not seen as a direct object.
Magamo Wrote:But at least we know that so far not a single native speaker has found the 聞く and TV combination in the ヒーローズは聞いてておもしろい sentences strange. I think that's because the Japanese sentences are like "The topic is Heroes. [...]In your sentences #2 and #3, ヒーローズ was unmarked. If native speakers automatically feel it's a topic but not an object, does that not suggest that ヒーローズを聞く isn't a viable option in this context? If it were 見る, on the other hand, native speakers would interpret it as object, topic, or both? (Pretending the OP's sentence didn't emphasize "hearing".)
Is this sentence correct? - magamo - 2011-02-19
Thora Wrote:I recall looking into 象は鼻が長い when it came up previously. "Possessive" popped into my head. Probably because some categorize those sentences by their ability to be converted to 象の鼻が長い (as Nadia had already mentioned, it turns out) and a bunch of theory on はーが sentences and the relation of X,Y and Z gets into the historical links of の and が.That's a different grammar point. These two sentences are parsed in a different way, but coincidentally both mean pretty much the same thing. An easy way to see the structural difference is to add one more adjective or verb. For example, 象は鼻が長いし大きい can mean either "Elephants have big and long noses" or "Elephants are big and have long noses." But 象の鼻が長いし大きい only accepts the former interpretation because 象の鼻 is an inseparable noun chunk while 象は is the topic of the whole sentence. Also, the は/が swapped version 鼻は象が長い only changes the implied sense while the meaning of 鼻の象は長い would be that the unusual object 鼻の象 is long, which requires a strange or rare context to make sense of it.
Thora Wrote:About the うなぎ文, I'm not sure it is so difficult for English speakers to comprehend. The example given is to imagine you're at a restaurant and the waiter returns with all the meals but no idea who ordered what. A diner in that situation might say, "I'm the salmon."That's a nice specific context to make English work a bit like Japanese. If you don't think the grammar point difficult, then there's no problem. It's quite unlikely that it's understood in an English way though because linguists already failed to explain は that way and are still struggling to find a novel way to explain this sentence today. There is still no consensus about it among linguists.
There are some exceptions that look as if direct word-for-word swapping between English and Japanese works. But it seems to me that they're usually idiomatic set phrases or depend heavily on context. Since you're a translator, don't you find it interesting when you run into a rare sentence which has a structure similar to こんにゃくは太らない and can be understood in a direct word-for-word manner? Coming up a particular situation which happens to accept direct translation for one specific example is already quite a difficult task, and I think that proves you're a skilled translator. But I'm not so sure if such rare examples help learners understand how は and other topic markers work very much...
In any case, as you probably already know, topic markers are often used wrongly (e.g., mixing up は and が), not used when necessary or overused (e.g., the typical translationese). Also, native Japanese speakers tend to do the complete opposite when speaking English, e.g., Konjak jelly doesn't gain wight. Obviously the original Japanese sentence is こんにゃくは太らない or こんにゃくが太らない. Since we only need to understand the grammar point intuitively through whatever means available, if particular rare sentences or contexts like yours can make it easier for learners, I think that's a great thing.
Thora Wrote:Is this sentence okay? If not, why not?Like any other normal sentence, it's ok in some contexts and not in other contexts. But if you're asking if there is particularly ungrammatical segment, then no. In other words, the sentence makes perfect sense, and if that's what the speaker means, then I don't see any reason it's considered wrong.
セリフがたまに日本語だったりしてヒーローズを聞いてて面白いよ
If you can't allow even the slightest unnaturalness, then the slightly twisted structure might be a problem. From the first half of this sentence, the grammatical topic would be ヒーローズ if explicitly stated. If the speaker were a native speaker, the topic would be on his unconscious mind while speaking the first half. And ヒーローズ would continue to be the topic until a new topic is explicitly introduced or the end of the sentence. But this word is marked suddenly as a different grammatical portion in the latter half, which suggests that the grammatical topic abruptly ended.
So there is very slight awkwardness. But I wouldn't say no native speaker would say sentences like this. It sounds a little convoluted as if the speaker is forming his idea while speaking. It's also a little bit like a speaker starts with "If he was the culprit" thinking he is not and ends with "he won't come back here" because the possibility that he committed the crime pops up on his unconscious mind while speaking the sentence. But it's much less obvious than this twisted English example, and I doubt many native speakers would notice. Anyway, it's not an error per se.
Your version can be used when you talk about the show after listening to the TV in the kitchen or if you're an AJATT follower who often listens to the TV while doing other things. But it can also be used when you're *watching* Heroes with your husband; the usage of English word "listen" has absolutely nothing to do with that of a Japanese word listed as its translation in a bilingual dictionary. It just means that you specified the object of 聞く when it's totally ok not to and that you used that specific verb rather than みる. As I already said, 聞く doesn't always imply you don't use your eyes at the same time regardless of whether you're talking about TV or not.
It's like you somehow specified the sex of a person in a Japanese sentence or used "あなた" when grammar doesn't require it. You can do it, and it doesn't necessary make your sentence unnatural or wrong. But the resulting sentence would work better in different situations than regular sexless or no-second-person Japanese. If you accidentally do it when you don't want to add an extra nuance, then it'd be considered a translation error made by applying a foreign language's grammar rule or convention. Sticking with みる because translation would use "watch" is the same kind of error.
Any of the three examples I gave in the first post works even when you *watch* the show, though the focus of the sentences must be dialogue. And your version can also work regardless of whether you're *watching* Heroes or listening to it, though the kind of context it works in is limited. The limitation directly comes from the fact that the word ヒーローズ is no longer a topic. An example situation only your version works in is when you're forming your own idea while speaking. It seems quite difficult to come up with a natural situation where your version sounds better. The meaning is clear and grammatically ok. But it's not what I usually say in normal context. In any case, it must be something like a reply to "えっ、何を聞いてて面白いって?" It's like you first said "ヒーローズって聞いてて面白いよ," and the interlocutor couldn't hear you clearly. So you repeat yourself, but you feet like you should add extra information "セリフがたまに日本語だったりして" to make sure the listener gets the point; you're guessing not saying this part might have being the cause of the "Sorry?" reaction. And you use the ヒーローズを聞く structure because it's used in the question you got. Well, this is a very contrived context. But it works, I think.
Anyway, like I said in an earlier post, zero-particle is not an omission. ヒーローズ聞いてて面白い is a complete sentence which has its own unique sense. It's not the same as ヒーローズは聞いてて面白い or ヒーローズって聞いてて面白い. ヒーローズを聞いてて面白い is also different from each of them. Like I already explained, the difference is subtle, especially between the three topic marker versions. But they're different. And if you add insert を, it sure changes the kind of context where the sentence works best.
Quote:As I mentioned, I didn't get the sense an inadequate understanding of topic use was behind the 聞く ｖｓ 見る issue. Iryoku had no objection to 聞く in #1, so presumably they didn't take ヒーローズ topic as the direct object (though grammatically it could be both.)I thought he wasn't 100% ok with the first sentence at first though? And the reason he was less against it was that he misinterpreted ヒーローズって登場人物 as ヒーローズという登場人物, I think. But I think this shows that he didn't understand how a grammatical topic works. It doesn't change the object of 聞く. Of course, the misinterpreted version can be understood as ヒーローズという登場人物を聞いてて面白い. But it can still be interpreted as ヒーローズという登場人物が日本語をしゃべるので、ヒーローズは聞いていて面白い as well. And asking what the object of 聞いていて is silly because there is none. It isn't taking an object.
Consider this English sentence "It rains." The subject is "it." But this subject doesn't carry any particular meaning. It's there simply because English needs a subject at least in proper grammar. You may analyze that "it" refers to Earth. Or maybe you can say "rain" is an intransitive verb so it needs a subject to specify who does this action. In this analysis, "it" may be "God." But in reality, "it" means nothing. So claiming it should be Earth or God is total nonsense. By the same token, it's nonsense to ask what the direct object of 聞く is because we don't have any in the first place. If it makes the Japanese sentence easier to swallow, you can insert an appropriate word. But it's pretty much like a nonnative speaker trying to determine what meaning "it" should carry in "It rains" because one particular translation of "it" in his native language happened to always refer to a concrete meaning. Just because the inserted word doesn't go well when translated into another language word-for-word by choosing words blindly from one particular bilingual dictionary doesn't mean the original sentence must be grammatically wrong. It's as silly as saying "it" can't be "God" because you're atheist.
Sure, "watch TV" is a set phrase in English to the extent that "the" is lost, so that using "listen to the TV" requires a super strong reason. But why does みる and きく have to follow a similar rule just because they're listed as example translations out of many other possible words in a bilingual dictionary?
As I said in another post in this thread, most of the time みる is best for describing the action of watching TV. But if you want to emphasize the part of the action involving your eyes, you can use 目で見る, e.g., CGがすごくて目で見て楽しい映画だよ (The stunning CG makes it fun to watch this movie.) This does NOT imply you must use earplugs to shut the audio. Similarly, if you want to emphasize the part of the action involving your ears, you can use 聞く, e.g., セリフが面白くて聞いてておもしろい映画だよ. You do NOT need to shut your eyes because you used this verb. There are tons of realistic situations that make you want to emphasize either part of the action "watch." Maybe CG is good, but dialogue and sound effects are mediocre. Or maybe beautiful scenery in key scenes is the selling point of the movie. You might be talking specifically about the dialogue like in our case and want to talk about language rather than the drama.
Did I answer all the questions?
Is this sentence correct? - nadiatims - 2011-02-19
Interesting post. Thanks for taking the time.
I still don't understand why 主格 is different than English subject though.
鼻と言えば象が長い
鼻は象が長い
can be translated directly to English as:
In the nose department, elephants are long.
This is a correct sentence, and depending on word stress could carry a range of different nuances. Which to choose is context dependant. So just like in Japanese, despite 'elephant' being the grammatical subject of the sentence, it doesn't literally mean elephants themselves are long (here 'are' does not mean '=' in the strictest sense). It could also be worth noting at this point that seeing as 形容詞 act like verbs in japanese, no copula is present in the japanese sentence. It is therefore not necessarily correct for a translator to choose the English verb 'be' (or it's other forms is/am/are). What I mean is the copula-like property inherent in the 形容詞 itself doesn't necessary imply as strict an X=Y relationship as the english copula usually does or it may be more flexible, but the japanese 主格 still seems to function as a grammatical subject just like in English.
Is this sentence correct? - yudantaiteki - 2011-02-19
The general way I cover は is based on JSL's explanation, that XはY presents X as a familiar, known item, and Y is something about it. X might be the subject or object of Y, but not necessarily. "Topic/comment" is another way to explain it. English speakers don't learn about topic/comment in school even though we use it all the time in casual speech; consider:
That ice-cream store that's near my house, it closed down.
What you were asking me about the other day, I found out the answer.
Heroes...it's a terrible show.
And so on. These aren't considered "proper" English but they're examples of topic-comment.
(As for zero-particle, one of the best ways to see that this is not simply "dropped particle" is that when you're asking a friend if they have a pen (to lend you), you say ペンある？ Putting either は or が in here changes the connotation and sounds less natural.)
Quote:In the nose department, elephants are long.Maybe it's grammatically correct, but I can't imagine any native speaker actually saying it.
This is a correct sentence
Is this sentence correct? - magamo - 2011-02-19
nadiatims Wrote:I still don't understand why 主格 is different than English subject though.I don't know if such a translation is considered a valid example to form a general rule...
鼻と言えば象が長い
鼻は象が長い
can be translated directly to English as:
In the nose department, elephants are long.
Anyway, this may help you intuitively see the difference:
You say Xが is pretty much the same as the subject of a sentence in English, e.g., 鼻が長い (A nose is long). You also accept that Xは can be a subject, e.g., 鼻は長い (A nose is long). If you don't, you would have to accept that the subject can be omitted, which alone would differentiate Japanese subjects from English ones; any grammatical portion you can drop without changing the meaning mustn't be a subject in the English grammar sense. So an English subject must at least partially cover the rolls of Xは and Xが. But then, if you compare 鼻は長い and 鼻は象が長い, you must conclude that subjects in these sentences are different, i.e., dropping a subject magically turns what was not a subject into a genuine subject when the grammatical role in Japanese stays exactly the same. In other words, your theory must conclude that a Japanese sentence can have more than one English-like subject.
So you have to admit either a complete sentence without a subject or with multiple subjects. Whichever you choose, it'll be a striking difference between the ways English and Japanese subjects work.
Another way to look at this is to separate an English sentence into two parts: S (subject) and R (the rest of the sentence). In English, you need both S and R, one of exception being a word sentence like "Oh!". One way to categorize Japanese is to see it as a language which only requires R for a sentence to be complete. Here are a couple example sentences having no S taken from Wikipedia:
ハマチの成長したものをブリという。
ここでニュースをお伝えします。
One natural way to systematically explain many natural Japanese sentences is to consider that Japanese doesn't have S. It should appear in a translated sentence because English grammar requires it. And there may be a portion which looks like coming from a certain part of the original Japanese sentence. But in this view, it's just a coincidence. When there appears to be a one-to-one correspondence between a portion of a Japanese sentence and the subject of a translation done in the nadiatimes way, it's often the part marked by either は or が. But obviously this is not always the case. And often the time exactly the same grammatical function in Japanese can appear either in S or R of translated sentences. In other words, it simply depends on how you translate them.
So if you see Japanese from this viewpoint, an equivalent of S doesn't exist in Japanese. But like English there is an item which must appear in Japanese, i.e., the last part of R in Japanese word order which is either a noun, adjective, or verb. Let's call this necessary part N. Now Japanese can be seen as a language which only requires N to which you can add other portions if you want like you insert an adverb (e.g., accidentally, fortunately, hopefully, and lately) into a simple English sentence with only a subject and a verb.
In short,
Japanese = N + optional information,
English = S+P + optional information.
If you take two sentences expressing the same idea, one in English and the other in Japanese, then most of the time N in Japanese doesn't have any word directly related to S in English. Often the time such a word pair can't be found. When you happen to find such a related pair between the two sentences, the Japanese word is most likely in the optional part. But this may or may not be marked by は or が. It may be marked by any particle.
If you pick the English sentence from a set of sentences translated from Japanese by applying unusual translation rules like nadiatims did, then the possibility that the related Japanese part is marked by が increases; you can manipulate the chance of matching on purpose. But this doesn't increase the similarity (or decrease dissimilarity) between S in English and a certain grammatical function in Japanese. It just means you're "fooling" yourself by deliberately making the two languages look similar.
On a side note, as I mentioned, N can be either a noun, adverb or adjective. So basically any Japanese sentence is classified into three types. This is the three types 名詞文, 形容詞文, and 動詞文 I sometimes mention on this forum. Naturally, in this view, behavior of a function word is explained according to the type of a sentence in question. は and が are no exception.
Edit: But there is no point in seeing Xが as something different from the subject of an English sentence if a simple view works for you. Grammar isn't necessary to learn a language anyway.
Is this sentence correct? - Thora - 2011-02-19
haha That's one funky sentence, Nadia. I feel like it would need to be possessive to be grammatical, but then it becomes a different sentence: 鼻は像のが長い。 One way to get a handle on that sentence (if you're interested) is to read up on it. Somehow getting completely confused does make it a bit clearer in the end. A caution: it becomes difficult to see が as a consistent subject marker and other forms reveal themselves as subjects.
Magamo, pace yourself, my friend. We don't want you to burn out.
I think I just experienced the ol' Magamo flattery battery switch. Gushing compliments on my super duper translation skills, then blindsided with a couple accusations of "blindly inserting words from a bilingual dictionary where they don't belong". :-( Well, the day I become a translator will be a sad day for readers indeed. I'm still trying to sort out コンニャク? こんやく? コニャック? こんにゃく問答? ;-)
Thanks for your thorough answer. I'd like to clarify something, but I have to wait until later.
hey Nest0r, look at all the pages!
Is this sentence correct? - magamo - 2011-02-19
Well, it's part of my daily writing practice so I'm being verbose because of lack of my writing skill, and unnecessarily detailed often on purpose. So if I burn out, it just becomes shorter and maybe less frequent.
I'm sorry for the tone especially in the latter half of the post. It was sort of inevitable when I got reminded of a recent argument with a person who wasn't very nice to me while writing the long reply rather hastily. Also, as you should already know, when you find a strange sentence in my post, it's most likely a nonnative error due to my shaky grasp of nuance!
Is this sentence correct? - nadiatims - 2011-02-19
Regarding 名詞文、形容詞文 and 動詞文. Correct me if I'm wrong but don't 名詞文 have to end in the copula, at least to be considered a formally correct sentence. If that's true, then it's just another 動詞文. If you don't consider the copula to be a verb that's fine, but then the same would be true for English. Equally 形容詞文 aren't really any different than 動詞文 because japanese adjectives are actually a class of verbs. It could perhaps be said that unlike English, Japanese doesn't have true stand alone adjectives.
あの子は奇麗だね that girl pretty is (sentence ends in a verb)
象の鼻が長い elephants' noses are long (sentence ends in a verb)
学校に行く school to go (sentence ends in a verb)
赤い林檎 is red apple (no adjective)
奇麗な女の子 pretty is girl, a girl who is pretty (here the adjective can not stand alone independent of the copula な)
yudantaiteki Wrote:That is because we would normally reorder it "Elephants are long in the nose department" if we chose to express this idea in this manner. Whether "in the nose department" still remains the grammatical topic if the sentence is ordered this way is perhaps open to debate. If you say a sentence like "Japan is cold in winter", you're communicating the same information as "In winter, Japan is cold" but may (depending on word stress) carry different nuance.nadiatims Wrote:In the nose department, elephants are long.Maybe it's grammatically correct, but I can't imagine any native speaker actually saying it.
This is a correct sentence
I think there is confusion in this thread between usage conventions and grammatical conventions. Usage conventions refers to the way native speakers habitually choose to say different things, and by grammatical conventions, I'm referring to the syntax to apply to parse sentences. I'd argue it's a usage convention that allows Japanese to drop subjects. Just as it's a usage convention that English speakers expect count nouns to be specified in some way (a,the etc). Usage conventions and vocabulary differ greatly but i'd argue that syntactically Japanese and English are less different than everyone seems to think.
I don't think は ever marks a subject in a Japanese subject. It's just that Japanese people will habitually use a grammatical topic at times when an English speaker would use a grammatical subject. There are different ways of expressing the same thoughts.