The "true" nature of が, subjects, 主語

Japanese
#1

Before I start, I’d like to ask you all a question. Here is this sentence: 「誰が猫が好きなの？」 AFAIK, it’s a perfectly normal sentence, meaning “Who likes cats?” My question is, how do you interpret this sentence, what is the subject?

  • 誰
  • 猫
  • Both 誰 and 猫
  • Neither

0 voters

This topic is purely out of academic interest, I’m not really looking for learning advice. I’m mostly interested in how advanced learners, fluent speakers, academics or native speakers interpret the language, and I already predict that there’ll be no consensus. I’m mostly interested in the discussion.

So in the beginning, you learn that が marks the subject, を the object. は the topic, and は can mask the others. Simple enough.

Then you learn that some words behave differently. 好き, 嫌い, 欲しい, 食べたい, 分かる, 聞こえる, potential, passive… Take this sentence: 「私には幽霊が見える」 Here が marks the target of the emotion/desire/ability/etc. Why が? Why not を? And where does the に come from?

So you either memorize these particle-substitutions, or someone corrects your understanding about these words:

  • 好き actually means “likeable/liked”, not “to like”
  • 分かる means “understandable (by the speaker)”
  • Passive can be translated to an “X got Y” structure (e.g. I got rained on), so even the adversarial passive makes sense
  • (I think these come from Jay Rubin’s Making Sense of Japanese? I haven’t read the book)

And suddenly が is back to being the subject marker again, and all is fine in the world.

But people are still arguing about the topic. Why, if it’s really that simple? Because, it turns out, it’s not that simple:

This is the first time I encountered the term “nominative object”, so I googled around a bit… and I found surprisingly little. Mostly research papers, some reddit threads, and that’s it.

So I jumped into the Japanese side of things. (BTW, it’s really hard to search for grammar explanations in Japanese - almost every result I got is about learning English, or only have trivial examples that do not highlight these nuances)

Here’s my not so scientific findings:

I’d be really interested if anyone else could chime in. Linguistic research, how is it taught in Japan, how does the opening sentence 「誰が猫が好きなの？」 is normally analyzed, is the western concept of subject even the same as the Japanese word 主語?

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#2

Looking forward to reading the rest of this post. But for now I just gave my response to the vote, and here I’ll give my reasoning and interpretation of the sentence:

「誰が猫が好きなの？」

I think the ending of the sentence is abbreviated. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember how to fill in the ending in the plain form, but I believe in polite form it would be like this:

「誰が猫が好きなのですか？」

This gives the type of sentence as subject + copula predicate (+ question-marker). Therefore, the grammatical subject of the sentence would be 誰が. Making the predicate 猫が好きなのだ (removing the question-marking か, and changing です back to だ).

Since subject + copula sentences are (as far as I’m aware) structured like (Noun-like A)が + (Noun-like B)だ, then that indicates that the Noun-like B is 猫が好きなの, which makes sense, since the の is a nominalizing の.

The thing の nominalizes is 猫が好きな, which is a modified (な-adj) version of another copula sentence (clause). That sub-clause, as its own sentence, would be 猫が好きだ.

And this sentence is a simple AがBだ sentence.

猫が好きだ ~= cat(s) are liked.
So, 猫が好きなの ~= one-for-which (cats are liked).
So, 誰が猫が好きなのです ~= someone is (one-for-which (cats are liked) ).
So the full sentence 「誰が猫が好きなのですか？」 ~= who is (one-for-which (cats are liked) )?

Which works out to the more-natural sounding English, “Who likes cats?”

And the answer that I gave is that the grammatical subject of the entire sentence is 誰が. There is also a grammatical subject for the sub-clause, which is 猫が. But the sentence itself only has a single grammatical subject.

YMMV, just my opinion, etc.

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#3

It’s the explanatory の: ～んです・のです (JLPT N5) | Bunpro – Japanese Grammar Explained

I shamelessly stole the example from this question/answer: Double が particles - Japanese Language Stack Exchange. I probably should’ve left out the “fancy” stuff, and should’ve just written 「誰が猫が好きですか？」

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#4

Okay, thanks for the correction. Is my assumption that it still behaves ‘noun-like’ in a のです sentence hold up, though? In other words, it still matches the B in AがBです, right? And it (the の) is still being modified by Cな in Cなのです?

#5

「誰が猫が好きなの？」is a normal sentence? I think I would ask “Who likes cats?” as 「猫のこと好きのなは誰ですか」

On the general topic: If as you said you are asking for purely academic interests, I’d suggest you turn to actual books written by academics. Online discussion would only mislead you. Not even native speakers would be qualified to answer these types of questions at the level you are inquiring in.

#6

I found it here: Double が particles - Japanese Language Stack Exchange. But the exact sentence also appears here: 誰が猫がすき？を英語に訳すとWholikescatで、ピアノを引いている... - Yahoo!知恵袋 (a Japanese person is asking about English translations)

If it’s not correct, then what’s the problem with it? I do agree though that your version is a bit more natural.

I’m asking here b/c I don’t really have a starting point. And I’m also interested in the difference between a native and a learners interpretation. I think Asher had a good example, that even a simple question like “How many words are in this sentence” can get you different results, b/c natives think about word boundaries differently than how it’s taught to foreigners.

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#7

I find it perfectly fine. What do you not find normal about it?

Being pedantic, but minor corrections:

「猫が好きなのは誰ですか。」

Saying 「猫のこと」sounds weird to me. I think this should be used with people, but I could be wrong here. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in about this.

I agree with this. As interesting as this topic may be, it would be unproductive unless there are linguistic people in the discussion. Otherwise it’s a guessing game as to what’s going on with each of these sentences.

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#8

If youre interested in an academic point of view there are a lot of books on Japanese linguistics in Japanese.

For the latter looking into 国語 resources should help.

#9

Okay, finally had the chance to read your whole post. Thanks for putting all this research together!

In particular, I found the Japanese Wikipedia page on 助詞 to be the most enlightening of the links, and I think it provides us with a much-needed clarification/distinction that can help untangle some of the confusion…

What I did was take that page and put it through Google Translate, so that I could look at the same page (in original Japanese) alongside its rough English translation. I tried to only use the English translation to help me quickly get the gist of what the text meant (to help me navigate the page easier), and then looked at the original Japanese to try to discern the precise meaning.

For now I’ll just summarize and indicate what I thought was the most significant finding.

It seems that when I (based on Cure Dolly) was using 主語 to refer to the purpose of が, that was not quite the correct word. The word I should have been using is 主格, which is translated as ‘nominative case’.

So! We come to a point of agreement! :partying_face: が does indeed seem to be the marker for ‘nominative case’ – but to be very specific, by ‘nominative case’, I mean 主格, just in case ‘nominative case’ in Western Linguistics has any nuances that are different from what is meant by the native Japanese Linguistics term 主格. (Perhaps they are true synonyms, I’m just declaring the specific term in case they aren’t.)

So, what I should have been saying is that が, being a case-marking particle (格助詞; where ‘case’ is indicated by 格), marks the ‘nominative case’, the 主格, the 主-case. Note the similarity to the ‘subject’, the 主語, the 主-word.

In one of your other links (the one about koto promotion), a later comment (have to click ‘その他の回答をもっと見る’ at the bottom of the visible comments to expand) says:

So, I think what might be happening is that the word 主語 (subject) represents an imported concept that doesn’t map cleanly onto Japanese. That’s why the Japanese Wikipedia page says (referring to the は particle):

But while Japanese doesn’t have any case particle (格助詞) which marks the ‘subject’ (主語), it does have a case particle which marks the 主格 (the ‘nominative case’), which is the case particle が. And I think it is in this role, as marking the 主格, the 主-case, that Cure Dolly was trying to emphasize.

What I’m gathering is that there is persistent confusion among many folks around the idea of the ‘subject’ (the 主-like-thing), muddying the distinction between the role of 主-ness in terms of grammatical syntax (主格), and in terms of semantic meaning (主語).

It seems to me that 主語 is a bit of an imported concept in Japanese, whereas 主格 is baked right in, with the が particle being its clear signifier.

Note that, for a more-complete understanding of this, I think it’s also important to take under consideration the idea of the ∅ (null, or zero) pronoun, and thus the proposed existence of an ‘invisible’ (really just omitted) ∅が in any sentence (or complete clause) that doesn’t explicitly have a が particle marking the 主格.

With the ∅が handy, this makes it much more straightforward for non-Japanese folks – who often don’t have deep, intuitive familiarity with case marking particles – to have in mind a kind of mental ‘placeholder’ for the syntactical marking of ‘whatever it is’ which has the 主格 (the 主-case, or in jargon the ‘nominative case’).

I think this explains why Cure Dolly so strongly emphasizes the role of が, advocates for the concept of ∅が, and refers to what she’s talking about as the ‘subject’ (which is at least familiar to Western learners), even though what she really means is the ‘nominative case’ (which is how Japanese speakers/linguists conceptualize things, but is generally unfamiliar to many Westerners).

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#10

(Post deleted since I misinterpreted a comment and wasn’t contributing anything to the topic).

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