Re: Passive Form

Bart Mathias wrote:
dareka wrote:
Ben Finney wrote:

[...]
I'll take this as an opportunity to once again praise Jay Rubin's
little volume "Making Sense of Japanese", a collection of essays on
troublesome topics for NSoE learners of Japanese. He illustrates the
lack in English of a clear equivalent for this precise Japanese verb
form, the "suffering passive":

[...]
"Pardon me, officer, but [...] I was stolen my suitcase!"

"What an odd way to put it!"

"Of course it's odd. I'm Japanese, and that's how we phrase these
things when our English is a little shaky!"

As the officer says, your expression may be odd, but it's
perfectly clear. From it, he knows that you are the victim, that
someone did the stealing, and that the someone stole your
suitcase. *Kaban wo nusumareta*, then, is a clear statement
involving you, the robber, and the suitcase, though only the
suitcase is mentioned.

I doubt this explanation. I think what is された/られた is
nothing but the 鞄 "syntactically".

But it's not proper to say something like that and not go into the
difference between 鞄を盗まれた and 鞄がぬすまれた、"syntactically."

As I have said before I think the function を、が and others
have is rather *semantical* one than syntactical. And I think
を gives the word or phrase to which it is tacked an
semantically objective, in senses of both 目的語 and/or 客観
的, position in the sentence or discourse in relation to the
verb in the sentence or an action or state that the speaker
tries to explain or convey. は gives a subjective, in senses
of both 主語 and/or 主観的, position. が gives, I think at
least in this case, mixed subjective and objective position.
鞄は盗まれた and 鞄が盗まれた kind of sound like a title of a
story or a subject of discussion following the theft in that
you explain or discuss what you do after the loss of the 鞄.
鞄を盗まれた sounds like, in this case, an objective statement
of fact.

--

dareka dareka@xxxxxxxxxxx
.

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