3

天を仰ぎ両手を合わせずにはいられない結果が得られている

In the above excerpt, I'm not 100% sure how to connect the 結果 with the rest of the sentence. I do understand that the meaning is something like "Obtained result that you can't but look at heaven clasping both hands". But, again and again, the lack of relative pronouns in japanese keep confusing me. Can someone give me some tips?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

It may help for you to break it up this way:

  • 「天を仰ぎ」since the verb is in this form（連用形）, you can expect another verb or clause to come next

  • 「両手を」since this is a noun that comes next, it must be the beginning of a clause and a verb will come next

  • 「合わせずにはいられない」the clause ends with this verb in the 連体形, so you can expect that next will come a noun, noun-phrase or clause that will be the 被修飾語 of these previous clauses

⇒「結果」（被修飾語）

Since「ない」directly modifies「結果」, all of the previous words connected to「ない」are part of that modification - No relative pronoun needed!

It as almost as if the entire utterance up until「ない」is one long adjective describing what kind of 結果 this「結果」is.

Improve this answer
3
  • Thanks, sazarando! Breaking part by part really helps. Nonetheless, when mentally translating into my mother tongue, which is portuguese, I still feel the urge to inject a pronoun to make sense of it. And which pronoun to choose in this context is my main concern.
    – Yuji
    Mar 19, 2019 at 23:15
  • 1
    For English, you might translate it as ”We are getting results that just make you want to put your hands together to the heavens” - where "that" is the relative pronoun.
    – sazarando
    Mar 20, 2019 at 0:50
  • I think the phrase-level pitch accent in Japanese reflects the shift where you would feel that a relative pronoun would go. See if you can find a Japanese speaker to model this sentence for you and perhaps you can pick it out.
    – sazarando
    Mar 20, 2019 at 0:54

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .