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The following sentence: この庭にある大きい石と池は、富士山と海をイメージして造られました。

This イメージして followed by 造られました irritates me. I know of several specific patterns where て form is directly succeeded by another verb like 星が見えてきた but I don't know of any such case with 造る. I've little idea how to understand this phrase.

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There's no grammatical problem here. I would translate this as

This garden's large rock and the lake were made to give the impression of Mt Fuji and the sea.

Even in English there is a mixture of passive and active, but there's nothing awkward or ungrammatical about this.

I wouldn't lump this in with constructions like 星が見えてきた。 The てくる form there is a fixed grammatical form. There are other uses of the て-form of verbs which can express reason or purpose. For example,

一所懸命{いっしょうけんめい}勉強{べんきょう}して試験{しけん}を合格{ごうかく}した。

Having studied hard, I passed the exam.

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  • Hm, I can see what you mean. But this combination of active て form and passive, resulting in a construction expressing what we would express through a consecutive clause of result, is indeed new to me. Why must my textbook always come up with stuff it hasn't taught me about before -.- Constructions like this would only be possible with nominalization, for example: ...ことに造られた. I don't know if this would be grammatical, but it's the only way I could think up with the grammar Ive learnt so far.
    – Narktor
    Commented Jun 28, 2017 at 7:53
  • @Narktor I understand the frustration with textbooks. I've been there many times myself.
    – A.Ellett
    Commented Jun 28, 2017 at 18:36
  • I don't see how you could use the construction ...ことに造られた in this context. To my ear it sounds strange, but then I don't have a native speaker's ear. If you were to try to rephrase it, I might try イメージするために, though even that sounds a bit strange. It'd be nice if a native speaker could chime in on this point.
    – A.Ellett
    Commented Jun 28, 2017 at 18:40
  • Textbooks can rarely cover everything, especially not in the order the real world throws them at you. I agree with A. Ellet about ことに造られた not working out in that context. If I were to try to rephrase the bit that bothers you, I,d probably flip the sentence around: 富士山と海をイメージをイメージに、この庭にある…
    – Philippe
    Commented Jun 29, 2017 at 12:50

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