I started wondering about something after coming across this sentence yesterday (regarding the character Dust Man from the Mega Man series):
その強力な吸引力に目をつけたワイリーが戦闘用に改造した。
I can understand well enough what it means. What I don’t understand is why the ideas in the sentence are ordered the way they are. As a native English speaker, my first instinct would have been to put “Wily” up front and then relate the two actions that he did. (Something along the lines of ワイリーがその強力な吸引力に目をつけて戦闘用に改造した。 / “Wily noticed his powerful suction power and modified him for combat.”) But in Japanese, it seems like a fairly common practice to relegate one such action to a modifying clause at the start of the sentence, with the subject not appearing until halfway through. And while sometimes said action feels like a nonessential modifier (“Wily, who noticed his powerful suction power, …”), in other cases, it really does just feel like another way of conveying a sequence of actions. Take, for instance, this sentence (from a completely different work):
うっすらと瞳を開けた少年の真上に、自分の名を呼び続ける母マトゥタの顔があった。
In both parts of the sentence, there is action contained within a modifying clause, with the doer of the action placed after it. But I’m not sure a phrase like “opened his eyes” (瞳を開けた) can really be called nonessential, because this is the first time we’re being told that the boy opened his eyes at all.
So my question is: When and why would I want to write a sentence this way? What is the nuance of burying the subject in the middle of the sentence, as opposed to the “X does A and B” structure?
I don’t have an answer as such (and this feels to me like the kind of “needs a native speaker intuition” style question that isn’t likely to get a lot of good answers here), but one thing I would note is that in Japanese that kind of short modifying clause doesn’t make the sentence longer and more wordy (no need for extra “who” type words etc), and it doesn’t require the reader to hold onto more information in their brain, because as soon as you get to the head noun of the clause you know what the modifying clause was for and you can forget it. I also wonder if その強力な吸引力に目をつけたワイリー… works better in the context of its paragraph because it starts with (what I assume is) the thing the preceding sentence was talking about, i.e. the suction power, so it links more tightly together.
Another possibility I’ll throw in – in the first sentence ワイリー is marked with が, not は – so although he is the subject of the sentence, he’s not the topic we’re really talking about, so his name doesn’t need to be prominent in the sentence – he’s not that important to where the author is focussing attention.
That is an interesting point, and one I hadn’t noticed. My brain still isn’t very comfortable with this type of structure because I tend to assume that the initial clause is the sentence, so when it turns out to just be modifying something else, I get disoriented and lose track of the sentence’s main idea. I’m sure I’ll get more comfortable with the structure eventually if I see it enough times… I just wish I had a clearer idea of why it’s used.
I suppose that could be the case for the first example. The preceding sentence, which was the first sentence of a brief description of Dust Man, was:
様々なゴミを吸い込んで圧縮処理する自動ゴミ処理ロボット。(The entire description was originally written using only kana; I just added kanji for clarity.)
I don’t have the context for the other example, so I’m not sure what the author’s idea was there. Maybe it really is just a stylistic choice…
Have you run into the style of writing where the whole sentence is just that first relative clause that ends with a noun and then, boom, period. End of sentence.
Anyway, I actually did manage to ask a native speaker about this. He said something more or less along these lines:
This word order is more for written Japanese, as opposed to spoken.
It helps to maintain a consistent focus (such as ロボット in the first example), rather than jumping back and forth between various things.
It distributes the information in a way that makes it easier to quickly picture the entire scenario.
Regarding Point 3, he mentioned that he felt like with the “X does A and B” structure, there would be “too much information included on a side.” I feel like this might be something of a Japanese preference with regard to processing order. But in general, it seems like pm215 was on the right track all along.