Everything I see in the dictionary seems to suggest that saying 〜を手伝う requires ~ to be a thing, more specifically an action… but OK, I found 人を手伝う in the Kenkyusha examples on Weblio’s EJJE site, so I guess it’s acceptable even formally speaking. That’s interesting. I was expecting に as well.
I guess I was aware of the fact that an ‘emergency’ wasn’t required, especially since you can say 助かりました as a form of thanks after someone has helped you in a fairly major way. However, I wasn’t aware of the power dynamic. Thanks a lot.
The reason I was laughing though, is that it was phrased as「宿題 を 助けて…」. Doesn’t that imply that it’s the homework that would be receiving help, and not the person who had been assigned it? I thought that was rather amusing. I completely agree that people sometimes need saving when it comes to homework. I’m occasionally one of them.
EDIT: It seems that some people do say 宿題を助ける, but it’s very rare on Google (49 results) as compared to 宿題を手伝う (tons of results; I can’t remember the exact number). 助ける, when not applied to people, seems more commonly used with processes or other things one can promote/push forward/help to advance, including 仕事 (work), 勉強 (study) and 消化 (digestion). I don’t think homework falls into this category because it’s something that can’t advance on its own and doesn’t have a natural tendency to do anything of the sort: it simply exists and is done.
Sometimes two nouns have a の between them (Shingeki no Kyojin, Kimetsu no Yaiba) and sometimes they don’t (Ansatsu Kyoushitsu, Jujutsu Kaisen) and I can’t figure out the underlying logic. It might have something to do with how anime titles are often sentence fragments but I don’t know
Removing the particles from something makes it feel more like a proper noun or previously established concept. Leaving them in feels more like you’re describing something rather than labeling it.
And, just to be clear, you can’t really do this arbitrarily in real life. Making something that wasn’t a proper noun into a proper noun is perfect for a title though.
I did some searching around, and it seems like そのゆえに or このゆえに would probably work ok (in that I found at least one example sentence with both),
but それゆえ（に） is a specific construction and may be more common in this situation (based on number of google results and stuff like that).
Yeah, I’m mostly interested in understanding how the それ and 故 fit together since you usually don’t place それ and then a noun. Jisho says 故 is also an adverb, but I’d love to know how the construction grammatically works since I haven’t come across that construction in my lessons yet. I mostly included the last part to avoid the question of “Well what did you think it would be?”
I don’t really think it’s like, a grammar rule - not one you can extrapolate anyway.
I think それゆえ is just a word that basically means そのゆえ (particularly when as an orphaned transition like this - I don’t think you can append it to stuff like you can ゆえ on its own)
Here’s why I don’t think it’s a rule you can extrapolate:
It seems like a pretty limited use exception to me - you can open with それゆえ to mean “therefore…” and that’s about all there is to it (from what I can tell)
(so yes - you’re right to spot それ＋noun as unusual)
Could be one of those things where it worked in older Japanese grammatically, and it stayed in modern Japanese as a set phrase even though the general construction wouldn’t normally be grammatically allowed anymore.
No, I asked how/why it works together. Generally speaking, saying something works just because that’s how it is isn’t going to be appreciated very often.
Did you read the results? An awful lot of them are for “それ、犬” which is a different structure.
I took their question as “am I missing something grammatically?”, not “why does this phrase exist?”. Keep in mind that this is the short grammar questions thread, so questions will usually, you know, be about grammar.
You said it gets “tons” of results. But tens of thousands of results is virtually nothing when you consider that common words/phrases tend to return millions of results.
People would understand what you mean, sure, but they’ll be judging you for your poor grammar the whole time. Since English uses “that” both prenominally and otherwise, a better equivalent for how それ犬 sounds in Japanese might be “those dog”. “Those dog is very cute”. People will understand, but you can guarantee they’ll be shifting their estimation of your language abilities down a few notches, whether consciously or unconsciously.
It’s better to learn and be right than to rely on Google.
Are people just talking about different things? それ犬 could appear in a sentence where someone has omitted the particle that would typically come after それ, like は.
This would obviously be different from something like それ故, where there’s no implied particle omission that I’m aware of.
And so the existence of それ next to 犬 in native sentences wouldn’t imply that それ can be attached to 犬, which was relevant to the topic at hand, but it would show up in google results.
My instant reaction was ‘それ＋common noun? Particle dropping for sure.’ Guess what? First page of Google results for the example raised tells me I’m right for all but one for which I’m not sure what the structure is. (But eh, it’s a product name on Amazon for what looks like a Disney dog suit, so maybe it’s just badly translated. Can’t be bothered to decipher it.)
Anyway, I'd suggest not arguing.
We all use the number of Google results as a justification to a certain extent – myself included, regrettably – and I guess it’s kinda unavoidable that we treat the internet as a corpus of sorts to gauge usage. However, let’s just say that this isn’t the first time ある誰かが has justified something with these results alone. I’m having flashbacks to a very long argument on another thread involving ‘instinctive understanding’ and two very famous particles that shall not be named… and that pulled in several other members including myself and Ryunosuke. I have strong suspicions we’d face the same situation here. We might even be facing the same person! I’m getting the same vibes, whatever it is.
Simply put, if we do, we’re gonna end this grammar thread prematurely by clogging it with useless posts.
In any case, some people have a much easier time simply accepting and absorbing usage, and I say this without any intention of being condescending: if they can do so and remember what something means without feeling concerned about why, good for them. My friend studying in Japan generally isn’t as good at breaking down structures as I am, but he’s currently more fluent than me, and he’s definitely fluent enough to take an entire science degree in Japanese, so who needs perfect parsing and deconstructing skills anyway? Some of us need to know, and some of us manage fine without such concerns. Good for us all, as long as we all find the information we need.
Now then,
Very interesting question. Just a quick note before I get to the rest: I wouldn’t expect て after it because noun+て is rare in modern Japanese – I think there are some structures in Classical Japanese that use it, but I don’t fully understand the classical usage of て, so I won’t comment on that – and yes, 故 is a noun first and foremost.
Also, while I agree that その故 feels sort of intuitive – I’m disregarding usage completely here and just talking about how a Japanese learner would think – absolutely none of the structures and examples in my dictionary around 故 being used in the sense above use a の. Absolutely none. Also, Googling その故 in quotes actually seems to reveal something: その故 seems to mean ‘the reason for that’, which makes perfect sense when you consider that the main meaning of 故 is「理由、わけ」i.e. ‘reason’. Therefore, my guess is that それゆえ is in fact an ‘appositional’ usage i.e. both それ and ゆえ refer to the same thing, which is a particular matter that has already been raised in conversation and which is the reason for something. Does that make sense?
How can we justify this? Well…
Yes, the search results are intriguing, but it could also just be that using this structure with これ is simply rare for whatever reason. Take, for example, それでは. It’s literally ‘with that’ or ‘on that note’, but has developed its own special context-based meanings like ‘well then, goodbye’. これでは just doesn’t seem as common or natural, right? Why? Well, in my opinion, it’s partly because これ usually refers to something that appears later in the conversation, which reduces use cases to situations in which something you can actually use (で being the ‘means particle’) is actually in front of you. That’s also why これゆえ doesn’t make sense as much sense: you wouldn’t say これゆえ in order to justify or explain something unless the reason is standing right in front of you, because it might not even have come up in the conversation yet!
As for evidence that it is an actual structure, here we go. From 大辞林, which has unfortunately been taken offline:
(You can find a similar definition here in 大辞泉 on Goo辞書. It’s definition #6 as well.)
I’m not going to translate everything, especially not the examples, because I’m not fluent enough, especially when it comes to explaining all the classical grammar that turns up since some of the examples are old. (I could look up the structures, but that would take more time.) Take a look, nonetheless, at the bit I’ve put in bold: it’s a formal noun (i.e. it’s grammatically a noun, but doesn’t have a meaning apart from the words it’s attached to), and ‘is used attached to nouns, the noun-linking forms of declinable words [i.e. verbs and adjectives] and so on; expresses a reason; [equivalent to] …のため and …だから; also used as …ゆえに and…がゆえに’.
As such, first off, we can conclude that the particle @DIO-Strawberry was looking for after ゆえ was に, though it’s optional. Secondly, we now know that it’s acceptable to attach 体言=substantives=nouns directly to ゆえ in order to express a reason, and we can see that in the examples offered by the dictionary. I think the fact that が can be used further strengthens my ‘appositional’ theory because が is often used for equivalence statements in which one says ‘A is B’.
As a final thought, I’d like to suggest that this structure isn’t as strange as one might think: don’t forget that 上（じょう）can be attached directly to nouns in order to express the context or basis for something, even though の上（うえ）で is also common and natural with a similar meaning. Both structures work.
(they were also asking about the particle, but not just that)
