I think these details are really hard to imagine without a concrete example sentence. Lemme check…
Ok I searched Murakami‘s 1Q84 (simply because it’s the largest volume of text I can search in one go) and it provided me with
ハイヒールの細いかかとで地面を軽く蹴っていた。
しかし何かが彼の意識の遠い縁を蹴っていた。
So like you said, the focus is clearly on the thing being kicked, I‘d say.
壁を蹴っている。
This could actually be either of the meanings, I can’t tell from context tbh.
I can’t believe you actually found three examples with 蹴る in one book!
(They all look more like the repeated action kind to me though 
)
There were even more usages of 蹴る, but the ones I quoted were the only ones in ている form.
It’s Murakami, you know 
Hm, that’s actually possible; I‘d need to read a bit more of the context to know for sure.
Both groups include verbs that are punctual (i.e. they don’t have an internal duration). But the verbs in a) also entail a change of state: if you die, you’re dead, if you get married, you get married, etc. You usually can’t repeat these actions (exceptions may of course apply).
By contrast, the verbs in b) don’t necessarily imply a change of state: you can kick something multiple times, you can jump more than once, etc.
That second category is sometimes known as semelfactive: Semelfactive - Wikipedia
Finished the rest of the reading today. So what did I find today?
Embedded sentence, aka the overarching term for subordinate clause and appositive clause (if I understood it right). Interesting to me that they choose to break out all those terms, but for example don’t seem to define group 1 and 2 except slightly in an appendix. Nor define the case particle thing.
This is not my first time reading in the dictionary, but before it has always been looking up some grammar, not reading all this preface stuff. (I tried to read the preface stuff right when I got the dictionary but at that point I gave up pretty quickly and I believe I skipped this part of it anyway.) And my experience with the main entries are excellent.
On the other hand, my opinion of this part of the dictionary is… uneven. The explanations are mostly good, but I feel like some things are missing and some gets broken down a lot in ways that seem a bit excessive, while others don’t get the same treatment.
I’m almost done with my reading of the first section of the book - and I agree that it has the feeling of something that was tacked on almost as an afterthought, rather than something that was carefully planned to be there right from the beginning.
As you and others have pointed out, some sloppiness is evident in the way that that section was constructed. I’d even question why it was included in the “front matter” rather than as an appendix at the end. As a ‘preface’ it’s a bit inapt, in that it assumes a level of knowledge that a beginner may not actually possess (until or unless the reader has digested material that is covered within the main content of the book).
That was still the “proper” pronunciation of 私 in my first Japanese learning book (published in the 1980’s)
Yep, same in Assimil from 1985, even though the English edition was printed in 2007
wahtahkooshee
After seeing this, somehow romaji doesn’t bother me at all.
I just caught up on last week’s reading. Thank you all for such an entertaining and informative discussion! It was enjoyable to backread 
Why yes, discourse, I would like to necro this topic.
I read the section and I was like, what could possibly have warranted 110 replies in this thread? Now I’ve read through it all and I think I wasn’t thinking big enough on how much there is to discuss about grammar. 
My favorite part:
The lower classes, and peasants 
1 year later…
I’ve been using this as a reference for years and recently decided to try it as a nonstimulating bedside read
I’m glad I waited for reading this through until I had an intuitive understanding of Japanese. Things I don’t know or only intuitively caught until now pop out and are more engaging at this stage. Everything else (most of it) is a matter of reading along easy example sentences.
It’s interesting to read the reactions here. I generally take the ‘many interpretations’ view of grammar so nothing bothered me per se (yet). I’ll put in some notes for things I learned or comments where I had a different reaction.
It was interesting to see the reaction to auxiliary adjectives, especially why is だ included, eg, ようだ. I agree, my mental model of that よう doesn’t include the copula, but the author’s highlight of that as a unit matched at least with how my Japanese friend explains things to me.
I wonder if including it is part of the mental model of many Japanese people, and one part of that mental model I’ve found very reliable is a sentence and sentence components really needs certain elements to be complete and that will always be included even if they leave out so many other words. In this example, while an い adjective can end a sentence, a な adjective needs the だ/です.
As westerners, we’re very firmly viewing a な adjective and seeing the stem as most relevant - we memorise or internalise other grammar to deal with the overall sentence construction. Whereas my impression is a Japanese person is viewing the adjective either in the context of what comes after it (connected with na ni or no), or ending a sentence - not on its own.
Anyway, this is something that has helped my listening comprehension, noticing what grammatical elements a Japanese speaker always strings together without a pause.
A spoken unit of a な adjective would rarely end at the stem. There would be a な、の、に + modified word、or だ etc after it.
I suspect highlighting a な adjective stem on its own therefore feels objectively wrong to someone with that mental model that something will be appended to it. Hence the choice of だ as the pragmatic method not to leave even an implied naked よう out there.
This entry was insightful, I had a similar reaction as the following two quotes, as after I read the entry I thought, yes, that makes sense, I’ve been intuitively understanding it that way and may occasionally produce it correctly myself in common constructions, but not because I realised what was going on. Having it laid out like this was helpful
I also felt like neutral / less subjective would have hit my intuition better than “anti-empathetic feelings”. Perhaps ‘without introducing feelings’ is what they were going for