3

先をこされて、いいものをとられてはと、信也はいそいで駄菓子屋に走った

In the above sentence, the character 信也 wants to get to the 駄菓子屋 before his sister, who is already close to the store. I understand the meaning of what's written, but I can't fully grasp how this sentence is constructed.

  • 先をこされる means "to be overtaken", so this part talks about the sister being overtaken by the hero, but いいものをとられて sounds like an item is being taken by the hero. Can two -connected verbs have different implicit subjects/objects?
  • What does はと mean here? It kind of feels like the と here means "in order to", but I don't know if that's possible.

1 Answer 1

6
+50

I think what's confusing here is sentence-final ellipsis and omission after the quotative と. That means that two predicates are omitted before and after と - the first one is inside quotation, the second is outside. Adequate predicates to fill in the blanks might be:

「先をこされて、いいものをとられては(いやだ)」と(思って)走った
「先をこされて、いいものをとられては(困る)」と(思って)走った

To your other point

先をこされる means "to be overtaken", so this part talks about the sister being overtaken by the hero, but いいものをとられて sounds like an item is being taken by the hero.

Both are instances of 被害の受け身 (adversative passive). Both clauses have the same (latent) noun in the -が case slot, that is 信也. In normal passive, you would use いいものがとられて. 先をこされる here means the character in focus is overtaken by someone else, いいものをとられて means someone else is taking something good and that is bad for the character in focus. See Is「酷い捨てられ方をされた」grammatical? for more about it.

It looks like this is from ふしぎ駄菓子屋 銭天堂 by 廣嶋玲子.

3
  • 1
    Another English-language term I've seen used for the 被害の受け身 is the "suffering passive". We have this in English too, albeit in a slightly different construction: "to have something done on someone" is one example, as in "she had the neighbors playing loud music all night on her". I had a related answer post a while back here. Commented Sep 21 at 6:13
  • 1
    In Japanese it's also called 迷惑の受け身. Commented Sep 21 at 10:19
  • 1
    Oh wow, I would have never figured the omitted parts around と on my own. I am starting to see that leaving out parts of the sentence in Japanese is no joke. As for the "adversative passive", I think I got lost because I have never seen a sentence using it without a subject. Thank you very much for this answer - I learned a lot.
    – Kapol
    Commented Sep 23 at 0:47

You must log in to answer this question.

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