I came across this sentence, “叫び声を上げようと口を開いた瞬間” and I’m having trouble learning more about the usage of “ようと”.
Immediately, I thought it seemed like it was going to have a する ending before 口, as in Verb[volitional]とする (JLPT N3) | Bunpro, and this is the first time I’ve seen it without one. But I also feel like might be the conditional と from と (JLPT N4) | Bunpro
I have no idea actually, but today I was doing this topic: Verb[よう] (JLPT N4) | Bunpro and よう possibly can be from there.
The volitional plus と is used in a few different patterns however in all of them it can be thought of as adverbial, so here it is describing the way in which they opened their mouth. Meaning in this case it would mean something like “The moment that I opened my mouth in an attempt to scream”. Normally the attempted action isn’t achieved when this pattern is used like this and as this is a partial sentence I am guessing what follows is the person in question not being able to scream despite them wanting to (this is the reason for using the volitional).
If you’d like me to expand a bit more on this then I am happy to but hopefully that answers the core of your question.
very likely to be ようとする but the する was omitted because Japanese lol. Although my guess would be that it was omitted because the verb 開いた also expresses the intent to scream.
Ah, I think I understand what you mean. Like the と that marks the way something happens, similar to quoting?
This was the full sentence “叫び声を上げようと口を開いた瞬間、こぼれ出たのは絶叫ではなく血塊だ”
Yeah, exactly. と can be used like this pretty much anywhere to say the way in which a verb is done. It is probably most common with the volitional but you do see it used like this in other contexts. When you have [Y]volitional+と[X] it means doing X in such a way that you are trying to do Y. This is clearest to see in the pattern ようとする which you came across yourself already.
As a thought exercise I’d recommend considering the difference between 〇〇と思う and 〇〇を思う, just to get a bit deeper into the nature of what と actually is doing when it is “quoting”. It can be argued that all uses of と are essentially linked (the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series takes that stance, for example).
As for your sentence, the usage is as I said initially. Basically this is a common pattern (in fiction/narratives) which signposts pretty heavily that someone is trying to do something but then for some reason can’t. In your sentence the person wanted to scream or tried to scream but couldn’t as a blood clot came out instead.