Previously in the series: Future tense
English speakers often struggle with noun/pronoun dropping in Japanese. Here’s an explanation of how it works in Japanese from Jay Rubin’s book Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You:
Can you imagine what English would be like without pronouns? Look:
“Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before, under dramatic circumstances. Briesseau had gotten drunk at the Deux Magots one night and staggered toward the river. Thinking Brisseau was already home in Brisseau’s apartment, Brisseau removed Briesseau’s clothes, but instead of getting into bed Brisseau got into the Seine. When Brisseau tried to pull the blankets over Brisseau’s self and got a handful of water, Brisseau began screaming.”
No one could stand that for long. Now let’s try it with pronouns, as in the original:
“Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before, under dramatic circumstances. Brisseau had gotten drunk at the Deux Magots one night and staggered twoard the river. Thinking he was already home in his apartment, he removed his clothes, but instead of getting into bed he got into the Seine. When he tried to pull the blankets over himself and got a handful of water, he began screaming.”
What a relief! But Japanese is even less tolerant of repeated nouns than English. Let’s see the passage looking more like Japanese, without all those repetitious pronouns:
“Cloquet and Brisseau had met years before, under dramatic circumstances. Brisseau had gotten drunk at the Deux Magots one night and staggered toward the river. Thinking already home in apartment, removed clothes, but instead of getting into bed got into the Seine. When tried to pull the blankets over self and got a handful of water, began screaming.”
Of course this sounds “funny” because of what we’re used to in normal English, but the meaning is perfectly clear.
Indeed, this is exactly how it works in Japanese. I wish Japanese teaching material would point out that it sometimes works the same way in English. Consider these:
Going to the store later. Want anything?
Carlos went to lunch with a friend. Said he’d be back around one.
Kiddo’s off to college later this year.
These are all extremely casual. In writing, they’d only appear in character dialogue. But in casual speech, English allows you to drop several pronouns. (And auxiliary verbs!) In the last sentence, a genitive pronoun is dropped, because if you’re using an affectionate term like kiddo people will automatically assume you’re talking about your own child. Japanese just allows this kind of speech in formal circumstances as well.
But casually dropped pronouns aren’t the only place English speakers naturally infer what a sentence is about. We all understand imperatives like Don’t go outside without the word you being added. (To its further credit, Rubin’s book does point out the case of imperatives.)
Moreover, English speakers understand the agents in most instances of passive voice. If I say, Students are taught the differences of certain Japanese constructions with English, but are often not taught the similarities, you know full well that the excluded by-phrase is something like: by people who teach Japanese. It doesn’t have to be spelled out.
English speakers intuitively know there’s something wrong with the sentence, “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.2” Few could probably explain it, but it’s because the English passive has a rule that the object of the by-phrase can’t be older in the discourse than the subject of the sentence. The speaker and listener are always discourse-old in English, so “by me” and “by you” are rare to see with passive voice. “By [pronoun]” is in general unusual, since pronouns are typically used to refer to things that are discourse-old.
There’s an exception: You can use “by me” in a passive construction for contrastive emphasis. An example I saw in the wild: “That last level was built by Stevo. This next level was built by me.”
This is the same situation in which it’s normal to use 私が. “I am the one who [verb].” And it would be just as weird to use 私が in Japanese as it would to use “by me” in an English passive, if you were not saying something like this.
I think Japanese instruction should use these analogs. English already has sentences for which the rule is “only specify agents when necessary.” Just expand the concept.
1 Japanese almost seems like it’s designed to anger the people who hate passive voice for not spelling out the agent of actions. That’s the norm in most Japanese sentences.
2 This sentence is taken (but slightly reworded) from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Unfortunately, Strunk didn’t actually understand what’s wrong with this sentence, and used it to condemn passive voice generally.