This has been driving me crazy for a while, so I finally broke down and made this post. I have really been struggling to understand what いられない literally means in the grammar points where it’s used.
I thought いる was only used with animate objects. Does it still mean “to be” and these uses simply exceptions to that rule? Also, is the conjugation here passive or potential?
I just checked the dictionary of advanced japanese grammar; they talk about it briefly on page 611.
The literal meaning of Vneg nai de was irarenai is “cannot remain not doing s.t.” The phrase carries the idea of “cannot help doing s.t.”
So いる here still means “to be” (maybe better understood as “to exist”/“to remain”), and いられない is its potential form.
Thanks for the reply! I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to try looking it up in DAJG. The sense of “to remain” makes sense–I knew いる had that meaning, but I thought it only applied to people staying in a location, as opposed to a state continuing. Knowing it has that semantic range, these grammar points are starting to make more sense to me (I’m a bit too literal of a thinker sometimes).
You probably saw it being used to express a continuing action or state after て form, too. It’s the same verb, but here it works as an auxiliary verb.
Oh, yeah! Good point.