Need help for "のではなく"

[shamankingfan111_505649]

So, I was playing a Japanese casual game on my phone when I saw a sentence with the construction "XのではなくY". With Google translate, I roughly got the idea that "のではなく" means something like "rather than".

However, I can't find this on the internet anywhere. Does the ので in のではなく have anything to do with the ので that has the same meaning as から？
Can anyone provide a breakdown of the expression to show how it means "rather than" and provide some examples?

[thegooseking]

shamankingfanさん、

To begin with, let's look at ではなく. This is an adverbial form of ではない (Note: dewanai - it's the particle は), meaning "it is not". So Yではない would be, "it is not Y".

We turn it into an adverb using the "drop い and add く" rule, to make ではなく, meaning 'not'. Then we put it in front of Y because it's no longer a verb. ではなくY means "not Y".

The の turns X into an adjective, which is a little harder to grasp, because it doesn't have a direct translation into natural English. X describes what kind of "not-Y" we're talking about, which is where "rather than" comes from. We're not talking about any old "not-Y", we're talking specifically about a "not-Y" that is X.

ではない isn't a very common way of expressing "it is not" (although you might hear it sometimes). Formally, you'll often see ではありません, and informally, you'll often see じゃない. But because this is turned into an adverb and doesn't appear at the end of a sentence, we can't use the formal ありません and have to use the plain-form ない, but we're still being formal, so we don't change では to じゃ.

小狼

(Edited because I somehow forgot how の works.)

[thegooseking]

I'll hold my hand up and say I think my previous answer was wrong.

It was on the right track, but in ＸのではなくＹ, the ではなく applies to X, not to Y. This makes sense, because ではなく contains a topic marker, and the topic can't very well come after that marker, can it?

So ＸのではなくＹ means "Y rather than X", not "X rather than Y" as I previously said.

I think the の, rather than making X an adjective, has a similar effect to when it's used in のです: that is, it softens the sentence. ではない, after all, is technically the negative of である, which is itself a slightly more literary way of saying です.

To put it another way, ＸのではなくＹ means functionally the same thing as Ｘではなくて、Ｙ.

(By the way, even Google Translate gets this wrong: If you try to translate "Like to play tennis in the spring rather than the summer" it gives you 春ではなく夏にテニスをするのが好きです, which actually means "I like to play tennis in the summer rather than the spring", which you can confirm just by asking Google Translate to translate its Japanese output back into English.)

小狼

[community.japanese]

san, 小狼 san

So ＸのではなくＹ means "Y rather than X", not "X rather than Y" as I previously said.

Yes, that's right.

　san didn’t provide us with a whole sentence so I have to guess it.
I think the の is a nominalizer.
For examples, 攻撃(こうげき)するのではなく守(まも)る which means protecting rather than attacking.
If it’s different, please provide me with a whole sentence.
Then I will explain it more.

Yuki 由紀
Team JapanesePod101.com