What is the は doing in this sentence?

Question

In this question, we are presently trying to better understand the function of the は that happens here:

当時{とうじ}母{はは}がどんな気持{きも}ちだったのか、子{こ}どもの私{わたし}には知{し}るべくもないことだった。

meaningwhise, we are all agreed that the sentence means:

As a child I had no way of knowing how my mother felt at that time.

(I'm just going with ssb's translation).

My question here is: can the は after 子供の私に be removed or does that make the sentence ungrammatical? / Is this は just a topic marker? a topic marker and a contrastive marker? or something further?

Answer 1

Edit:

I just remembered that there is a には which can not be replaced by に or は. It's similar to にとっては, which might fit better here. e.g.

それは私にはどうでもいいことだ
その頃の私には、夢にも思っていなかった事だ

This kind of には is inherently contrastive so you always use は. (But にとって is still contrastive without は, it's a litter hard to explain.)

Whether this には in included in the scope of the subordinate clause is a little tricky. You can say something like:

わたしには、それは、大切な宝物です。
子供の私には、それは、知るべくもないことだった。

But you can definitely use it in subordinate clauses without dropping the は.

I can't find much explanation in dictionaries. 大辞林 has only a single line for it:

「…にとっては」の意を表す。 「ぼく－，ぼくの考えがある」

But it's not clear if this には is に + は, e.g. people say

私にいい考えがある

大辞泉 does not mention this usage.

The following is a part of the original answer.

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I personally believe “topic は” cannot be solely semantically defined, because I can't find reasonable criteria and even Japanese linguists seem to disagree on the scope of “topic は”. e.g. some linguists consider “には” and “では” as “contrastive は”, while some think they are “topic は”.

If we talk about the “topic は”, I think we usually means:

1. It's often used in the main clause and can't be omitted

2. It's often not used in subordinate clauses.

For other kinds of は, they may freely appear in relative clauses.

The structure of your sentence can be understood as follows

[...]どんな[...]だったのか(、それ)は、子供の私には知るべくもないことだった。

In this sentence, the は appears in a subordinate clause, so it's not likely to be a topic は.

I also think “contrastive は” is the origin of all other はs. Different はs may functionally overlap so it's possible a single は has several functions or several different は appears in the same sentence.

Arguably “topic は” is always contrastive, because everything is different.

Answer 2

When we get in to complicated sentences the black and white grammatical rules become harder to apply but if we analyse the sentence:

母がどんな気持だったのか、子どもの私には知るべくもないことだった。

Then my non-native parsing is that:

母がどんな気持だったのか、＝"topic/subject"(I'll come back to that)

~ことだった= nominaliser linked to the "topic/subject"

知るべくもない= item being nominalized=characteristic of topic/subject, in this case something that could not be known to me at the time. "Known to me" is somewhat literary way of saying "understood by me"

Regarding the には: it seems to equate to "by" or even "to" as in "something that could not be known BY/TO me [as a child].

I agree with Yang Muye, that the "には"is close to "にとっては” and, very conveniently, I have found the following sentence in spaceALC:

私にとっては望むべくもないことだった。
I hardly dared （to） hope for it.

When I said you could drop the は and it would still be grammatical I meant it in exactly the same way that you could drop it from にとっては and the meaning would still be pretty clear, ie にとって＝to me, after all, it is not unusual for にしてー＞に. If the sentence was spoken then perhaps the は could be replaced with a pause (?)

Topic/subject
In the sentence "私にとっては望むべくもないことだった" the topic/subject (ie "it") is not stated but "それは” would suffice. In the same way I parsed "母がどんな気持だったのか、" as the "topic/subject" of our sentence.

To me the "、” is marking the topic/subject as は would in the construction AはBことだった.　Of course you could not follow か with は, but the question does not arise because the that is not what the writer has done anyway.

The は that follows に is helping to make the contrast between the writer at the time of writing and as a child and is drawing the readers attention to what follows.