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?
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
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.
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 okay? [edit: with the added を.]
