Re: Mystery passive

John Reeves <johnyaku@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

The passive in question is, of course, 解される "is interpreted
(as)" / "is understood (as)" / "is taken (as)".

However, this does not seem to be either the honorific passive or the
"suffering" passive. I'm open minded about the possibility of this
being a potential ("can be interpreted as") but I have my doubts
because 解できる is also used frequently.

In any case, who is doing the interpreting? As far as I can tell, it
must be the judges.

It's left unspecified. The actor is not the subject of the verb in
this form; and that is probably key to the reason why that form was
chosen.

Second draft translation: We intepret this assertion as effectively
being no more than an assertion of 'mistakes of fact'.

My mental model for it would be:

This assertion receives-the-act-of (unspecified subject)
interprets it as effectively being no more than an assertion of
“mistakes of fact”.

That makes for terrible, stilted English; but I find that it's best to
be explicit in one's understanding of the Japanese text that this is a
grammatical structure on an equal footing with any other; and that
English simply does not have a direct equivalent.

Of course, the meaning *can* be translated to English, but not without
deliberately altering the grammatical structure of the sentence so
that the 「-られる」 form *is not there* any more. Having done that,
it's folly to try to find a direct correspondence in the English.

If I'm right, this is a strange use of the passive, because the
writer is using it to describe his own action. This doesn't fit any
of the uses the passive that I have seen until now.

I don't think it's at all helpful that this gets called the “passive
form”, because English has a “passive form” and it just doesn't
work like this at all. The two concepts get unnecessarily conflated.

Try this:

The 「-られる」 form is used any time when the *receiver* of an action
is the topic, and for whatever reason we don't want to switch topic
away from that. The actor of the action might be specified or not; the
object of the action might be specified or not. This verb form,
though, allows us to say that some entity *received the action*.

Once we have that, all the other things you listed just become special
cases: The “suffering passive” is used when our reason for focussing
on the recipient is to emphasise their grievance. The “honorific
passive” is used when our reason for focussing on the recipient is to
avoid undue attention on the actor. Et cetera.

In the passage that you quoted here, the reason for focussing on the
recipient is simply because it's more important to the writer to focus
on the recipient (in this case, the assertion), since that's already
the topic of the whole passage. By choosing a verb for that has as its
subject the *recipient* of the action, the actor of the action can
thereby be neatly omitted and left to float in the nebula of context.

There are also numerous examples of 認められる, even though it seems
clear from the context in each case that it is the writer (the
appeal court judges) who are accepting/admitting various evidence,
testimonies, etc.

Here you come closest to answering the mystery: this isn't a *new* use
of the 「-られる」 form. It's just a demonstration that the “standard”
uses you know and love are only special cases of this form, notable by
their specialness but far from the standard purpose of the form.

I will post other examples if the example above is not clear enough,
but has anyone else come across a similar phenomena? Any other
suggestions for how to make sense of this?

I hope that helps.

You may also be interested in a similar thread from 2007
<URL:http://groups.google.com/group/sci.lang.japan/browse_thread/thread/92ca38a015078330/8aeb3e31ab8a0eba?#8aeb3e31ab8a0eba>.

--
\ “Listen: we are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody |
`\ tell you otherwise.” —_Timequake_, Kurt Vonnegut |
_o__) |
Ben Finney
.

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