While reading the light novel for 君の名は I came across this sentence in the first chapter:
私は大切な誰かと隙間なくぴったりとくっついている。
Is using なく
here equivalent to using ないで
or does it have a different meaning altogether?
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Sign up to join this communityWhile reading the light novel for 君の名は I came across this sentence in the first chapter:
私は大切な誰かと隙間なくぴったりとくっついている。
Is using なく
here equivalent to using ないで
or does it have a different meaning altogether?
The なく is the 連用形 of ない used in the sense of:
10 名詞に付いて、否定の意を含む形容詞をつくる。「こころ―・い」「違い―・い」「面目 (めんぼく) ―・い」 (デジタル大辞泉)
ない can be attached to a noun, forming an i-adjective with a negative meaning ("without~~"). A few more examples: 「[絶]{た}え[間]{ま}ない」「休みない」「[跡形]{あとかた}ない」「[相違]{そうい}ない」
[隙間]{すきま}なく in your example is the 連用形, or the adverbial form, of 「隙間ない」, i.e. 隙間+ない.
Examples: 「絶え間なく」「休みなく」「跡形なく」「[余念]{よねん}なく」「[仕方]{しかた}なく」
It's come to my attention that the answer by @Chocolate is a much more grounded answer than mine, and admittedly this was the first time I've learned about such a structure in grammatical terms (noun + なく = adverb).
In light of that, I offer my original answer a (not the) way a Japanese language learner can remember or reason out what noun + なく
probably means.
In my personal experience, as a non-native Japanese language learner never having studied the noun + なく
form from a book, noun + が + なくて
has always been the way I've mentally reasoned out what noun + なく
means while communicating with native speakers. One of the first things I (and likely many other Japanese language learners) learned when starting out was the existence of noun + が + ない
, so from that building block I would deduce the meaning of noun + なく
In practice it's always helped me correctly understand at least the big-picture meaning, but apparently not the standard grammatical basis.
隙間なく
means
隙間がなくて
隙間 is a noun, so the conjugation ○○ないで isn't applicable.