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按

"大阪ではタピオカを入れた飲み物を売る店がたくさん***できていて***、。。。”

I looked it up in the Weblio Japanese-English Dictionary (the most trustworthy one online I suppose) and found this definition of できる (as below) the most reasonable one for the sentence above. enter image description here

To my confusion, the definition and its example sentence do not seem like the same thing.

The definition says "to come into being""to start to exist""to take form". But then its example sentence is more like "to conceive (a child)" rather than "to appear""to start to exist." Can it be applied to both physical objects and living things? Or is it restricted to the latter?

Thank you all for taking the time to answer my question! I deeply deeply appreciate it!

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  • 3
    I'm pretty confused by what you mean by "No girl you found the wrong guy". Why do you think that it's a negative meaning there or something? – Ringil Sep 11 '19 at 16:52
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    Yes, your comment about "no girl" is very confusing. I'm looking at the E↔J entry in Weblio right now, and I can't see any such sample sentence. That aside, the "come into being" sense is the correct one for the Japanese text at the top of your post. – Eiríkr Útlendi Sep 11 '19 at 18:13
  • Possibly useful: japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/2706/… – Eiríkr Útlendi Sep 11 '19 at 18:28
  • Hi guys I just editted the question to make it clearer. – Cassandra Sep 12 '19 at 4:31
  • Hi Eirikr I've clicked on that link of yours and I'm pretty sure it's on the third definition. – Cassandra Sep 12 '19 at 4:36
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Remember が is a subject marker.

2人の間に
between the two (parents),

男の子が
a boy (←SUBJECT!)

できた。
came into existence / started to exist / formed.

Hence "a boy was born". できる is an intransitive verb, whereas "to conceive" is transitive. When you say "to conceive a child", the child is an object, but that's not how the original Japanese sentence is constructed.

There is a transitive verb もうける that means "to conceive (a child)". With this, you can say 彼女は男の子をもうけた "She conceived a boy". See 男の子 is now marked with を, an object marker.

In conclusion, there is no syntactical difference between 店ができる and 男の子ができる.

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  • Thank you very much again!! It helped a lot! – Cassandra Sep 13 '19 at 16:23

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