Usage of て/ので + 心配


連絡がなくて／ないので、みんな心配していました。

Please may I ask for the above sentence, should I use なくて or ないので。thanks




  * 連絡が **なくて** 、みんな心配していました。- "There hasn't been any contact (from someone) **and** everyone worried"
  * 連絡が **ないので** 、みんな心配していました。- " **Because** there hasn't been any contact (from someone), everyone worried"
  * 連絡が **ないから** 、みんな心配していました。- " **Because** there hasn't been any contact (from someone), everyone worried"

The so-called "て-form" can be seen as a kind of adverbial form which makes a
syntactically dependent clause, but semantically it's "raised" basically to
make a sentence of two independent clauses - in English and many other Indo-
European languages we use a conjunction for that. Japanese uses verb
conjugation. Hence so-called "て-form" is also sometimes called "connective
form".

Then from the meaning "X and Y" follows the meaning of "because X, Y" - this
relies on the context.

Versions with ので and から are "proper" dependent (adverbial) clauses:

  * <verb>ので signifies an "objective" cause - we try to can analyse ので as <verb>の (verb nominalisation) followed by で (instrumental/static locative case marker - meaning "with" or "at") - glossed as " _in the situation of <something happening_>" 
    * で - " _in the situation of_ " (in this specific pattern)
    * ~Vの - " _< something> happening_"
  * <verb>から signifies a more "subjective" cause - it can be seen as stemming from <noun>から - an ablative case marker (meaning "from"): 
    * this can be glossed as: " _from that <something happens>_"
    * from this stems the meaning of: " _because <something happens>_"

