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連絡がなくて／ないので、みんな心配していました。

Please may I ask for the above sentence, should I use なくて or ないので。thanks

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    Duplicate of japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/56865/… ?
    – user4032
    Jun 13, 2019 at 8:33
  • I understand that て/ので is used to express cause-to-effect relationship, however, is it てis only used when you want to express something that you can’t control but ので is used when you express something that can be controlled? So for the above example, because there’s no contact from him/her so I worried about him/her, in this case should I use ので？
    – Agnes
    Jun 13, 2019 at 10:28

1 Answer 1

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  • 連絡がなくて、みんな心配していました。- "There hasn't been any contact (from someone) and everyone worried"
  • 連絡がないので、みんな心配していました。- "Because there hasn't been any contact (from someone), everyone worried"
  • 連絡がないから、みんな心配していました。- "Because there hasn't been any contact (from someone), everyone worried"

The so-called "て-form" can be seen as a kind of adverbial form which makes a syntactically dependent clause, but semantically it's "raised" basically to make a sentence of two independent clauses - in English and many other Indo-European languages we use a conjunction for that. Japanese uses verb conjugation. Hence so-called "て-form" is also sometimes called "connective form".

Then from the meaning "X and Y" follows the meaning of "because X, Y" - this relies on the context.

Versions with ので and から are "proper" dependent (adverbial) clauses:

  • <verb>ので signifies an "objective" cause - we try to can analyse ので as <verb>の (verb nominalisation) followed by で (instrumental/static locative case marker - meaning "with" or "at") - glossed as "in the situation of <something happening>"
    • で - "in the situation of" (in this specific pattern)
    • ~Vの - "<something> happening"
  • <verb>から signifies a more "subjective" cause - it can be seen as stemming from <noun>から - an ablative case marker (meaning "from"):
    • this can be glossed as: "from that <something happens>"
    • from this stems the meaning of: "because <something happens>"
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    You have a mistake in your first sentence. Also shouldn't the English translation be past tense?
    – Fireheart251
    Jun 13, 2019 at 12:43
  • Oops, I have corrected the mistake. Just a copy-paste error, sorry. And yeah, it's past tense.
    – Yanagi
    Jun 13, 2019 at 12:54

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