Particle to use with 跳ね上がる

Question

Today I wanted to express that it hurts when my cat jumps on my stomach, so I said:

"猫がお腹の上に跳ね上がるとすごく痛い。"

but my friend corrected me to 上で. I asked another friend, who also said で makes sense. While I understand the difference between で and に, this didn't make sense to me at first because I thought で should be where the action takes place, not where the action is resulting. And even if one couldn't use に directly, I was thinking there should be at least some phrase like に向かって that could be used. Or maybe 跳ね上がる was the wrong word to use from the start, and I should have used another word like 飛び上がる. Could anyone enlighten me?

Answer 1

I made a post on HelloTalk to see what people thought. I used the example sentence, "猫{ねこ}がテーブルの上{うえ}(に・で)跳{は}ね上{あ}がった。" and got quite a few responses. Here are some of them, translated:

• "If you use で, it feels like the cat was already on top of the table."
• "If you use で, it means the cat jumped from the table. に is better."
• "I think it's に."
• "テーブルの上に飛{と}び乗{の}った。テーブルの上｛うえ}にピョンと飛{と}び乗{の}った。 I think these are used more often."
• "テーブルの上に飛{と}び乗{の}ってきた。Perhaps it might depend on the region what people say."

It made me curious that people used 飛{と}び乗{の}る, which is defined by both Jim Breen's dictionary and Daijirin/Daijisen as jumping onto a moving object, like a horse or a car. One of the commenters said a lot of people use it this way too, however.

Answer 2

The place is here not literally the place where it takes place but rather the limits of where the action can take place for the statement to be true. The で here is like a combination of ‘because’ and ‘within’.

東京で 漫画喫茶に行きたい

You can look at this in two ways. Either Tokyo is the place where you want the action to take place, or you can think of Tokyo being the place the statement is limited to.

To come back to your example, in this instance it’s clearly a limiting で because the statement is only true when part before it is met. You might not like the cat to jump onto other places too, but this particular place takes présidence over the other possibilities.