What is これ the subject of in this sentence?


Dad has just given a useless answer to a question. Next we have:

> これが情けないことに、父ヒロシの答えなのだから、がっくりである。  
>  This, pathetically, is dad's answer, and it is disappointing.

Not sure if I'm parsing this correctly. On my first reading I tried to make これ
the subject of 情けない but I couldn't make any sense out of it. The comma made me
think that これが情けないことに was a single unit. If this is the case, how can I
understand this construction? How does これが fit in?

I abandoned that line of thought and decided that これ actually went with the
middle part of the sentence, i.e. これが父ヒロシの答えなのだ and that 情けないことに was more of a
parenthetical comment. Is this the correct parsing? If so, why is the comma
placed where it is? I know that commas don't really serve any grammatical
purpose in Japanese but this one seems really misleading/confusing.




You are right in that これが is the subject of 父ヒロシの答えなのだ.

情けないことに works as a sentence adverb that modifies the whole sentence. Generally
this is the case with phrases ending in ことに. Some examples:

  * 幸運なことにPS5を買うことができた Luckily I was able to buy PS5.
  * 彼は残念なことに試験に落ちてしまった Unfortunately he failed the exam.

In terms of translation, _what is..._ or _to be..._ may be similar sometimes.
(e.g. what was unfortunate.)

I guess a source of confusion is that in English you can use enclose such
phrases with commas, but in Japanese doing the same is a little odd even if
not impossible (i.e. in this case using "、情けないことに、").




You are right in that これが is the subject of 父ヒロシの答えなのだ.

情けないことに works as a sentence adverb that modifies the whole sentence. Generally
this is the case with phrases ending in ことに. Some examples:

  * 幸運なことにPS5を買うことができた Luckily I was able to buy PS5.
  * 彼は残念なことに試験に落ちてしまった Unfortunately he failed the exam.

In terms of translation, _what is..._ or _to be..._ may be similar sometimes.
(e.g. what was unfortunate.)

I guess a source of confusion is that in English you can use enclose such
phrases with commas, but in Japanese doing the same is a little odd even if
not impossible (i.e. in this case using "、情けないことに、").

