Have you managed to get a hold of the dictionaries of Japanese grammar? There are some good descriptions in there.

From "A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar":
to iu: "a phrase marking information which identifies or explains the noun following the phrase"
called; that says ~; that

Ok, maybe not that helpful.

My japanese is upper intermediate at best, so don't take this as gospel, but here's my take on it

In the example sentence you gave という is probably best translated as "the fact that". Unfortunately the english translation didn't quite capture that, perhaps it should have been

The most interesting thing was THE FACT THAT the main character was the criminal

The meaning doesn't change much but there is a slight change in nuance.

Last edited by joesan (2008 March 11, 10:38 am)

Virtua_Leaf wrote:

And looking at this:

主人公が犯人だったというのが一番面白かった。
The most interesting thing was that the main character was the criminal.

I just don't get what という is being used for there. It seems to me it'd mean the same thing without it.

I'll take a stab at this.

My guess is that when the object of a verb is itself capable of standing as a sentence, you need some way of expressing its structural relationship as an object. For example, "you are hungry" can be embedded as the content of my thought by saying "I think THAT you are hungry." Something similar is going on here. If the "most interesting thing" is just a noun, you don't need this pattern. But here, the most interesting thing is a sentence: "the main character was a criminal." In my view, the というのが has a gramatical function that allows you to embed the "the main character was a criminal" into the sentence as the content of what is "most interesting." The result is roughly as follows: "The most interesting thing IS THAT the main character was a/the criminal."

So, in this particular sentence, I think it is functioning similar to "is that" or "that" or, as someone said elsewhere, "the fact that."

If you were to drop the というの, my guess is that this function would be lost. The result would be (I think) that the independent clause "the main character was a criminal" would no longer be the content of "the most interesting." Instead, it would sound more like "the main character was a criminal, but the most interesting thing." The link between the two parts of the sentence would be different and, in this case, would not make sense.

Last edited by howdycowdy (2008 March 11, 2:20 pm)

Thanks Johnzep. That takes it up level and is quite interesting.

Can I just say thanks to everyone? I feel I've gotten a tighter grasp on this now. I'll get some practice in and hopefully I'll get used to it.

A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar was a little too expensive, so I downloaded it in eBook form. I'll give it a read and see what I can pick up.