What is the grammatical analysis of the sentence 「君を笑いに来た」?


In English, the popular translation of 「君を笑いに来た」 is "I came to laugh at you,"
but ever since I heard the original in Japanese, I was curious as to what is
going on in the sentence from the grammatical perspective (in particular, the
「笑いに来た」 part). Does anyone know?




# Your Sentence

This is how it breaks down:

[code]

    [君を　　　　笑い　　　]に　　　 来た  
    [kimi=wo     waraw-i   ]=ni      ki-ta  
    [you=PATIENT laugh-CONT]=PURPOSE come-PAST
    "I came to laugh at you"
    
[/code]

That is:

  * the inner clause is 「君を笑う」 "laugh at you",
  * that inner clause gets inflected to the 連用形{れんようけい}: 「君を笑い」,
  * then it gets added as an argument to 「来た」 via the `PURPOSE` 「〜に」

* * *

# The `PURPOSE` 「に」

I call this 「に」 the `PURPOSE` 「に」 in my gloss above.

  1. **Most verbs do not take a`PURPOSE` 「に」 argument**: usually, if you want to specify the purpose you need to do something more complex like 「ために〜」.

**The verbs that do allow for this`PURPOSE` 「に」 are movement verbs (移動動詞).**

In _A Reference Grammar of Japanese_ , Samuel Martin gives examples of verbs
that take the `PURPOSE` 「に」:

> 行く・来る・かえる・戻る・出る・出向く・出かける・赴く・寄る・入る・歩く・上る・押し寄せる・向かう・集まる・群がる・立つ・逃げる・顔を出す・かかる

(Pulled out of examples on Martin 1975, pp. 405-406.)

This is far from a conclusive list though.

  2. On the **inner verb** (「笑う」, in your case), there's a semantic constraint. Basically, the inner verb needs to be something a human willfully does. Examples of inner verbs that don't work are 「開く」 (not something a human does) and 「乗り過ごす」 (not something you willfully do).




# Your Sentence

This is how it breaks down:

[code]

    [君を　　　　笑い　　　]に　　　 来た  
    [kimi=wo     waraw-i   ]=ni      ki-ta  
    [you=PATIENT laugh-CONT]=PURPOSE come-PAST
    "I came to laugh at you"
    
[/code]

That is:

  * the inner clause is 「君を笑う」 "laugh at you",
  * that inner clause gets inflected to the 連用形{れんようけい}: 「君を笑い」,
  * then it gets added as an argument to 「来た」 via the `PURPOSE` 「〜に」

* * *

# The `PURPOSE` 「に」

I call this 「に」 the `PURPOSE` 「に」 in my gloss above.

  1. **Most verbs do not take a`PURPOSE` 「に」 argument**: usually, if you want to specify the purpose you need to do something more complex like 「ために〜」.

**The verbs that do allow for this`PURPOSE` 「に」 are movement verbs (移動動詞).**

In _A Reference Grammar of Japanese_ , Samuel Martin gives examples of verbs
that take the `PURPOSE` 「に」:

> 行く・来る・かえる・戻る・出る・出向く・出かける・赴く・寄る・入る・歩く・上る・押し寄せる・向かう・集まる・群がる・立つ・逃げる・顔を出す・かかる

(Pulled out of examples on Martin 1975, pp. 405-406.)

This is far from a conclusive list though.

  2. On the **inner verb** (「笑う」, in your case), there's a semantic constraint. Basically, the inner verb needs to be something a human willfully does. Examples of inner verbs that don't work are 「開く」 (not something a human does) and 「乗り過ごす」 (not something you willfully do).

