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Consider the following situation.

  • Both the teacher and her student are not at school when the following occurs.
  • The teacher posted a picture of a cake in her facebook wall.
  • The student posted a comment saying おいしそう!明日学校に持って来ていただけませんか。

Questions

In my understanding, 「~持って来て~」must be replaced with 「~持って行って~」 because the teacher will do the job for the speaker (student) in a direction away from the place where the speaker (student) exists at the time of speaking.

However, according to the teacher 「~持って来て~」is also acceptable because the student will be at the school when the teacher brings the cake to the school.

Which reference is used to determine whether to use てくる or ていく? The location where the speaker exists at time of speaking or the location where the speakers exists at the time the て action will happen in the future?

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  • "according to the teacher..." Who is this teacher? YOUR Japanese teacher or the teacher in this "story"?
    – user4032
    Dec 1, 2016 at 15:19
  • @l'électeur: My Japanese teacher is the same as the teacher in the story. Dec 1, 2016 at 15:20

1 Answer 1

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This is the same problem as 行く and 来る.

You should consider "the point of view" (according to the link above), rather than physical location.

In this case, the teacher physically moves from his house to school. So, the teacher can say 持っていきます but the student can't.

If the student uses 持っていく, his/her point of view would be the teacher's house. This shouldn't be the case as the student is considering seeing the cake at the school, rather than something about the teacher's house.

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