Postby mmmason8967 » November 2nd, 2014 7:39 pm
No, there's no such thing as a polite te-form.
The politeness level and the tense (past, non-past, etc) only occurs in the last verb in the sentence. Any other verbs cccuring earlier in the sentence will be in either dictionary form (aka plain or casual form) or else in te-form. As an example, here is a sentence taken from a story called わらしべ長者 or Warashibe Chouja (meaning "Rice-stalk Millionnaire"). In the story, the hero comes across a wealthy mother and daughter resting beneath a tree. The hero asks if there is a problem, and the mother replies:-
娘は、とても疲れて、歩くことができないんです。
Musume wa, totemo tsukarete, aruku koto ga dekinai n desu.
My daughter is very tired and cannot walk, you see.
The desu at the end (in blue) is polite and non-past, which means the whole sentence is polite and non-past--even though the sentence contains a verb in te-form (in green) and two verbs in plain or casual form (in red). The n desu at the end of the sentence indicates that what's being said is an explanation of some sort. We can remove it from the sentence but we'll need to change the last verb dekinai to dekimasen to keep the sentence polite:-
娘は、とても疲れて、歩くことができません。
Musume wa, totemo tsukarete, aruku koto ga dekimasen.
My daughter is very tired and cannot walk.
Again, the verb in blue defines the tense and politeness of the whole sentence. To put the sentence into the past, we just need to use the polite past form of the final verb--i.e. change dekimasen to dekimasen deshita:-
娘は、とても疲れて、歩くことができませんでした。
Musume wa, totemo tsukarete, aruku koto ga dekimasen deshita.
My daughter was very tired and could not walk.
マイケル
