に ambiguity in こういった[A]の対応には少なからず救われている部分があった


> あまりにも子供じみた言動に呆れる。  
>  だが、こういった[A]の対応には少なからず救われている部分があった.  
>  深く踏みこまずに居場所を与えてくれるこの距離感に、周囲の人間も惹かれて集まってくるのだろう。

I'm tripped up on the second sentence. Is the 部分 part of the childish
behavior, or the person on the receiving end? Can にはhere be used to indicate
both location and causative source?




I'm not sure how textbooks classify に(は), but the important point is the
structure Aに(は)Bがある, which broadly means "A has B". So, translating little by
little:

> Yet, [こういったAの対応] had [少なからず救われている部分]

So it should be obvious now that 部分 is part of the childish behavior, at least
if you assume that the childish behavior is the same as [こういったAの対応]

> Yet, this kind of reaction from A had a part which [少なからず救われている].

The subject of [少なからず救われている] isn't stated explicitly, but from context one
would assume that it's "I" or "we" or something like that. So:

> Yet, this kind of reaction from A had a side which we were saved by quite a
> bit.

Note that 部分 is the agent (not the subject) of the passive phrase (i.e.
部分に救われている), but Japanese relative clauses do not capture this relationship.
The passive construction isn't really necessary in English, but is idiomatic
in Japanese which tends to prefer animate subjects.

The translation 救う→save here isn't very good, the next line hints that the
interpretation of this is that A's behavior, annoying as it is, somehow proves
to have some benefit to the speaker.

My total translation, very free, but hopefully idiomatic, would be something
like

> Yet there was something quite relieving about this kind of reaction from A.

Edit:

Firstly there seems to be some discussion about whether 少なからず modifies 救われている
or あった, and I admit that my choice was maybe less likely than the alternative,
but it doesn't really change the high-level structure of the sentence, so
removing IMO irrelevant parts, we get down to

> Aの対応には救われている部分があった.

From here, if I understand correctly, the discussion goes on whether に is the
passive-agent に or (my claim) に as part of a whole-part relationship
construction. This, to me, seems to be the same question as identifying
whether the sentence is parsed

> [Aの対応には救われている]部分があった. (passive-agent)

or

> [Aの対応]には[救われている部分]があった. (whole-part relationship)

For the first parse, I think it is fairly well established that relative
clauses cannot have topics.

<http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/relativeclause.html> 'First, you
cannot use the topic marker (ha) "wa" in relative clauses, because topics and
focuses are defined in a sentence, not a clause.'

Even if you argue that this is a contrastive は, you would get the approximate
meaning "There was a part (where we) were saved by A's reaction (but not by
other things)", which is very unlikely.

The second parse is the only one possible to me. Of course, 部分 should not be
read literally as a "part", it's more like a "side" or an "aspect" of A's
reaction.

