Я приведу два-три параграфа из Making Sense of Japanese:
The Myth of the Subjectless Sentence
The very first time they present an apparently subjectless sentence, all Japanese language textbooks should have large warnings printed in red:
You Are Now Entering the Twilight ZoneIt is here, more than anywhere else, that the language suddenly begins to melt into that amorphous mass of ceremonial tea and incense and Zen and haiku, where distinctions between self and other, I and Thou, subject and object, disappear in a blinding flash of satori. Now the student sees that the phenomenal world is but an illusion, it is all within you and without you. Absorbed into the great Oneness (or Nothingness; take your pick), we enter into the true Japanese state of mind, and we experience first-hand what makes the language
vague.
Meanwhile, the Japanese themselves go about their business, commuting and shopping and cooking and raising their kids' math scores to some of the highest in the world and making super color TVs and cars, using unnamed subjects—and objects and everything else—all over the place, utterly unaware that their language makes it impossible for them to communicate precisely.
Enamored of their vaunted "uniqueness," the Japanese have been as eager as anybody to promote the illusion that their language is vague and mysterious. Not all of them
buy into the myth, of course. Take the linguist Okutsu Keiichiro, for example. "Japanese is often said to be vague," he notes, "partly because subjects and other nouns are often deleted, but if the speaker and listener are both aware of the verbal or nonverbal context in which the utterance takes place, all that is really happening is that they don't have to go on endlessly about matters they both understand perfectly well. In fact, Japanese is an extremely rational, economical language of the context-dependent type."'
The greatest single obstacle to a precise understanding of the Japanese language is the mistaken notion that many Japanese sentences don't have subjects.
Wait a minute, let me take that back. Lots of Japanese sentences don't have subjects. At least not subjects that are mentioned overtly within the sentence. The problem starts when students take that to mean that Japanese sentences don't refer in any way to people or things that perform the action or the state denoted by their predicates. The same goes for objects. They disappear just as easily as subjects do.
What Japanese doesn't have is pronouns—real, actual pronouns like "he," "she," and "it" that we use in English to substitute for nouns when those nouns are too well known to bear repeating. And that's all that we use pronouns for: because we don't want to hear the same things over and over, whether subjects or objects or whatever. Can you imagine what English would be like without pronouns? Look:
- Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before, under dramatic circumstances. Brisseau had gotten drunk at the Deux Magots one night and staggered toward the river. Thinking Brisseau was already home in Brisseau's apartment, Brisseau removed Brisseau's clothes, but instead of getting into bed Brisseau got into the Seine. When Brisseau tried to pull the blankets over Brisseau's self and got a handful of water, Brisseau began screaming.
No one could stand that for long. Now let's try it with pronouns, as in the original:
- Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before, under dramatic circumstances. Brisseau had gotten drunk at the Deux Magots one night and staggered toward the river. Thinking he was already home in his apartment, he removed his clothes, but instead of getting into bed he got into the Seine. When he tried to pull the blankets over himself and got a handful of water, he began screaming.
What a relief! But Japanese is even less tolerant of repeated nouns than English. Let's see the passage looking more like Japanese, without all those repetitious pronouns:
- Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before, under dramatic circumstances. Brisseau had gotten drunk at the Deux Magots one night and staggered toward the river. Thinking already home in apartment, removed clothes, but instead of getting into bed got into the Seine. When tried to pull the blankets over self and got a handful of water, began screaming.
Of course this sounds "funny" because of what we're used to in normal English, but the meaning is perfectly clear. Once it is established that Brisseau is our subject, we don't have to keep reminding the reader. This is how Japanese works. (And, in certain very explicit situations, so does English: "Do not bend, fold, or spindle," "Pull in case of emergency," etc.)
There is only one true pronoun in Japanese, and that is nothing at all. I like to call this the zero pronoun. The normal, unstressed way of saying "I went" in Japanese is not
Watashi wa ikimashita but simply
Ikimashita. (In fact, strictly speaking,
Watashi wa ikimashita would be an inaccurate translation for "I went." It would be okay for "I don't know about those other guys, but I, at least, went." See "
Wa and
Ga: The Answers to Unasked Questions.")
Instead of using pronouns, then, Japanese simply stops naming the
known person or thing. This doesn't make the language any more vague or mysterious, but it does require that we
know who is doing things in the sentence at every step of the way. This is not as difficult as it may sound. After all, take this perfectly unexceptional English sentence: "He mailed the check."
To a beginning student of English, this sentence could be very mysterious indeed. Speakers of English must seem to have a sixth sense which enables them to intuit the hidden meaning of "he." How do we native users know who "he" is? Well, of course, we don't—unless he has been identified earlier. Again, the same goes for objects. "He mailed the check" could be "He mailed it" (or even "Mailed it") in the right context, and nobody would bat an eyelash. I recently caught myself saying, "He's his father," and the person I said it to was not the least bit confused.
On the matter of unexpressed subjects, Eleanor Jorden's excellent
Japanese: The Spoken Language notes that "A verbal can occur as a complete sentence by itself: there is no grammatical requirement to express a subject." Lesson 2 contains a strongly worded warning to avoid the overuse of words of personal reference, noting how often Japanese exchanges avoid "overt designation of 'you' or 'I.'" The explanation offered for this is socio-linguistic:
- This avoidance of designation of person except in those situations where it has special focus is a reflection of the Japanese de-emphasis of the individual, and the emphasis on the occurrence itself rather than the individuals involved (unless there is a special focus)."
I would be the last to argue that Japan's is a society of high individualism, but I do think it takes more than a glance at the society to explain why not only human beings but pencils and newspapers and sea bream can and do disappear from linguistic utterances when reference to them would be considered redundant. In the beginning stages of language learning, especially, example sentences are often thrown at students outside of any context, which can cause more bewilderment than enlightenment when dealing with grammatical points that make sense only in a context. Imagine a Monty Python character walking up to a stranger on the street and suddenly blurting out, "He mailed the check." He'd probably get a good laugh—and just because of the lack of context.
If you have learned such words as
watashi, boku, anata, kimi, kare, kanojo, etc., you probably think I'm forgetting that Japanese does have pronouns, but those are only adapted nouns originally meaning "servant" or "over there" or the like, and they are not used simply to avoid repetition as English pronouns are. If you tried putting
kare or
kare no in for every "he" and "his" in the Brisseau passage, you would end up with Japanese just as stilted and unnatural as our first version above. (One way that certain Japanese authors—Akutagawa Ryunosuke comes to mind—give their prose an exotic "foreign" tone is to use more "pronouns" than are strictly necessary.) It's true that, when these pseudo-pronouns are used, they are standing in for other nouns, but Japanese uses these things only as a last-ditch stopgap method of keeping the discussion clear when the zero pronoun threatens to evaporate. As long as the writer or speaker is confident the referent is clear, the only pronoun is zero.
I said above that Japanese unnamed subjects require that we know who is doing things in the sentence at every step of the way, and without a doubt the most important single step is the
verb that the subject is doing (or being). Subjects may drop away, but verbs rarely do. In fact, subjects
are subjects only when they
do something or
are something: otherwise, they're just nouns hanging in space. "Ralph" is not a subject until we give him something to do or be: "Ralph croaked." What did Ralph do? "He croaked"—or, in Japanese, "Croaked" (
Nakimashita). "Ralph is a frog." What is Ralph? "He is a frog"—or, in Japanese, "Is a frog" (
Kaeru desu).
I repeat:
All Japanese sentences have subjects. Otherwise, they wouldn't be sentences. True, as Jorden says, "there is no grammatical requirement to express a subject," but just because we don't overtly refer to it doesn't mean the subject isn't there. Subjects and verbs do not exist in separate universes that float by chance into positions of greater or lesser proximity. They are securely bound to one another, and unless we insist upon that, our grasp of the Japanese sentence becomes more tenuous with each more complicating verbal inflection.
The need to keep track of subjects becomes absolutely crucial when the material you are dealing with contains verbs in some of the more complex transmutations that Japanese verbs can undergo: passive, causative, passive-causative, and
-te forms followed by such delicious directional auxiliaries as
kureru, ageru, yarn, morau, and itadaku.
It's one thing to say that the need to keep track of subjects is crucial, but quite another to say how to do it. One extremely effective method can be found in the now discredited language-learning technique of translation—extremely precise translation in which you
never translate an active Japanese verb into a passive English one, in which you carefully account for every implied "actor" in a Japanese verbal sandwich, in which you consciously count the number of people involved in an expression such as
Sugu kakari o yonde kite yarasero.
The next two chapters go into more detail on the relationship between the subject and the rest of the sentence.
The Invisible Man's Family Reunion
If the invisible man married the invisible woman and several generations later their offspring decided to have a family reunion, this would not only pose a terrible problem for the photographer, but choosing partners for the three-legged race could waste the entire day.
This is not as irrelevant as it may seem. Izanagi and Izanami, the creators of the Japanese islands, were probably invisible before they descended to earth, where they acquired physical bodies. We can be fairly certain that it was this original invisibility that gave rise to the zero pronoun in Japanese.
When they contain just one invisible subject or object, Japanese sentences are easier to keep track of, but things start to get tricky when directional verbs of giving and receiving enter the action, and by the time you get to causatives, passives, passive-causatives, and causatives combined with directional verbs, the number of zero pronouns running around the Land of the Reed Plains can be positively overwhelming.
The following is intended to help you work backwards from what you might find on the page, operating on the assumption that you have already come through the material in the other direction.
The best advice I can offer you is to go back to the textbook. It's all there and it's probably all clearly explained in terms of both direction and levels of respect. When you study it this time, though, don't worry so much about politeness as direction. The most important thing is to keep track of
who initiates the action. Because the verbs themselves make it perfectly clear who is doing the giving or receiving or causing or doing of an action, there is often no need to mention the parties involved overtly. Whether mentioned or not, they are
always there.
GIVING IN TWO DIRECTIONS:
Kara, Ageru, Sashiageru; Kudasaru, KureruFirst, the giving-away verbs:
yaru, ageru, and
sashiageru. I have listed them in ascending order of respect, but they all mean the same thing, "to give," and they all indicate giving that moves away from the speaker. Whether that giving is down and away, up and away, or up-up and away, the crucial thing is that the speaker describes the giving as being done by himself or someone he identifies with (if only momentarily).
X o ageta, then, is usually going to mean "I gave him X" or "I gave her X" or "I gave them X." If the giver is not the speaker but a third-person member of our group, it could mean "He gave him X." It will never mean "He gave me X" or "They gave us X," because that would have the direction wrong. The giving never moves toward us: we are the ones who initiate the action of the giving.
Ageru is especially clear in this regard, because it literally means "to raise up"—to raise something up to someone who is above you in the hierarchical Japanese view of social relationships (though in fact this may not be true: the important thing is the direction away).
The direction remains fixed whether the verb of giving takes a noun object (
Se:ta: o ageta / "I gave him a sweater") or is used as an auxiliary verb after another verb in its -
te form (gerund) to indicate the "giving" of the "doing" of the verb to someone else, as in
Kaite ageta / "I gave her [my doing the] writing," "I wrote it for her").
Notice it's
I gave her
my writing. "I" does both the writing and the giving. You'll see why I emphasize this in a minute.
Kudasaru and
kureru also mean "to give," but the direction of the giving is always from the other person to the speaker or someone in his group, exactly the opposite direction of
ageru etc., but still "giving" and not "receiving. The speaker describes the giving as being done by someone else-someone outside his group-toward him
X o kureta, then, is usually going to mean "He gave me X or "She gave us X" etc. It will never mean "I gave him X," and perhaps more importantly, it will never mean "I got X from him." The other person is the subject, the doer, the giver, the one who initiates the action of giving.
Notice what you're doing when you politely say
kudasai to someone. You are actually
ordering that person to do the verb
kudasaru-literally, to "lower" something down to you, the direction opposite to
ageru's "raising up." (
Kudasai is an imperative evolved from the regular imperative,
kudasare). Because the verb implies that you are grovelling down here in the dirt, waiting for the exalted other person to take the initiative to "lower" whatever it is you want down to your filthy place, you can get away with issuing such a command. It is ALWAYS the OTHER person who performs
kudasaru and the less polite
kureru which places the other person at a less elevated altitude' thus preventing nosebleeds.
Be very careful here, though. When textbooks or teachers say that
kudasaru and
kureru mean "someone gives to me," this does not mean "someone—anyone-some floating, unspecified person gives to me," but either "the stated subject gives to me" or "the unstated but known subject gives to me." In English, known subjects are not called someone," they are referred to by pronouns-he, she, you, they.
As with
ageru, kureru can follow a -
te form to indicate the "giving" of the action described by the -
te verb, but of course the action is initiated by the other person for "me."
Inu o aratte kureta without a stated subject does not mean "Someone washed the dog for me," and it especially does not mean "The dog was washed for me." It means "He (or she, etc.) washed the dog for me." The direction of the giving is fixed, always
from the other person. Thus, even though no subject may be stated within the Japanese sentence, we know from the meaning of the verb that it is somebody else, and we know from the particular context whether it is "he" or "she" or "you" or "they." "Someone" is always wrong as a translation for a known but unstated subject, though it may be okay as a paraphrase, as in "Someone pledges allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. ..."
Be as vigilantly on guard against translating such a sentence into the passive voice as you would against committing murder. If you translate a Japanese sentence that means "He washed the dog for me" into an English sentence, "The dog was washed for me," you kill the invisible subject of the original Japanese sentence. "He" simply disappears in the translation process and fails to show up in English, even as an agent—"The dog was washed for me by him." What's worse, he is replaced as subject by a dirty dog, which in the original was an object. The action didn't just happen. We know who did it, and we are telling.
Now, here is something really important, so pay attention. Notice that, when we are trying to figure out who's doing what among a bunch of verbs consisting of a -
te form followed by one of these directional auxiliaries, we start with the subject of the verb that comes
last. In a -
te kureru construction,
kureru is the final verb, and in -
te ageru constructions,
ageru is the final verb. The final verb forms our base of operations.
When verbs of giving—in either direction—are used as auxiliaries after a -
te form, the same person does both the -
te verb and the auxiliary, whether I
ageru to him or he
kureru's to me:
- Tegami o kaite kureta. / "He wrote a letter for me (or to me)."
- Tegami o kaite ageta. / "I wrote a letter for him (or to him)."
With verbs of receiving, however, there will be a split. Let's move on to the next section and see what that is all about.
RECEIVING IN ONE DIRECTION:
Morau, hadakuIn one sense, verbs of receiving are simpler than verbs of giving since receiving happens in only one direction. Whereas one set of verbs of giving means "I give to him" and the other set means "He gives to me,"
morau means
only "I get from him" (as is true, of course, for its humbler equivalent,
itadaku, to which all comments on
morau apply). There is no form for "He gets from me." Third-person descriptions of receiving will always mean "He gets from him/her/them,"
never "He gets from me."
In spite of its single direction, however, when
morau is used an auxiliary after -
te, it causes students much more trouble than
ageru because there is a crucial split between the doer of the -
te verb and the doer of the auxiliary of receiving. In -
te morau constructions, "I" is the subject of the final verb (the
morau), while the one who does the -
te verb is the other person. You can't receive from yourself the doing of a verb:
Inu o aratte moratta / "I had him/her/them wash the dog for me."
As with verbs of giving, the final verb, the
morau, forms our base of operations in keeping track of which invisible actors are doing what. A literal translation of a -
te morau construction will always begin with the subject of the final verb, "I" (or we, or Taro, if he is one of us): "I get from the other person his doing of the -
te verb."
Notice how the same situation can be described from two points of view:
Kaite kureta and
Kaite moratta. In
Kaite kureta, the subject initiating the action is the other person: "He wrote it for me." In
Kaite moratta, "I got him to write it for me," or "I had him write it for me." While
Inu o aratte kureta is "He washed the dog for me,"
Inu o aratte moratta is "I got him to wash the dog for me."
Notice, too, how the identity of the doer of
morau or
kureru limits the possible uses and meanings of certain everyday expressions. You can, for example, ask another person if he/she will
kureru for you, but since you are the one who
morau's, you can't ask him if he will
morau from you, and since only you can take the initiative to
morau, you can't ask him if you will
morau from him. So these are possible:
Kaite kuremasu (kuremasen / kudasaimasu / kudasaimasen) ka / "Will you please write it for me?" But you can't ask,
Kaite moraimasu (moraimasen / itadakimasu / itadakimasen) ka / "Am I going to take the initiative to get you to write it for me?" which sounds a little like the soggy camper's lament, "Are we having fun yet?" You
can, however, ask the other person,
Kaite moraemasu (iitadakemasu) ka / "
Can I get you to write it for me?" = "Will it be possible for me to get you to write it for me?"
Again, since you are the one who does
morau, you can add the subjective ending -
tai, expressing desire, to it and make the subjective statement that you want to
morau as in
Kaite moraitai / "I'd like to receive from you your writing this for me" = "I'd like you to write this for me." But because the other person is the one who
kureru's, you can't say something like
Kaite kuretai, which looks as though it should translate "I'd like you to write it for me" but which is in fact impossible because—even if you are a clairvoyant—you can't say "I feel that you want to give me your writing of it."
The warning about murdering your subjects by translating -
te kureru constructions into the passive applies with even greater urgency to -
te morau constructions. You would only see
Inu o aratte kureta in situations where the identity of the subject of the final verb
kureta is quite clear. But since
you are the subject of
Inu o aratte moratta, there can be less emphasis on the doer of the washing, so you might use the expression in contexts where the washers are not clearly specified: "I had them wash the dog for me," which slides all-too-easily into a passive such as "I had the dog washed." Beware of English "equivalents" for such forms that resort to the old "someone," too: "I had the dog washed by someone." This is not what's going on in the Japanese. The actors involved are present as zero pronouns: "I had him/her/them wash the dog for me." This may sound terrifically picky, but I guarantee that if you resort too uncritically to the passive and "someone" at this stage, a
real someone in the text or conversation is sure to get bumped off when you have to deal with more challenging material.
There'll be more on this later under the discussion of the passive.
