Postby thegooseking » March 5th, 2017 5:50 pm
Dylanさん, こんにちは、
私の自転車 is a noun-phrase, not a sentence. Like in English, noun-phrases in Japanese can't be inflected, so we need to pair it with a copula to gain inflections (just like we need conjugations of the verb "to be" in English, although verbs in English don't have a negative, so we also need the adverb 'not'). So we can add the copula to get 私の自転車だ - "It is my bicycle", then negate the copula to get 私の自転車じゃない . If you dig into it, this sort of means "(The statement) 'it is my bicycle' isn't (true)" but it's easier to translate it as "It is not my bicycle".
Remember, だ is, more than anything, an assertion that the clause it completes is true, so conversely, じゃない means that the clause it completes is not true. You also have things like でしょう which is the copula equivalent of adding そう to the い-base of a verb, indicating that it's something that seems to be true (based on your own observations; use だそうです for something that seems to be true based on what you've heard).
I have my own question on a similar theme, though. What is the difference between じゃなく and じゃなくて? I think I know the grammatical difference (じゃなく is an adverb and じゃなくて is the て-form of じゃない) but I still don't understand when it would be preferable to use one or the other, since they both seem to mean "not X, but Y". Some examples from jisho.org:-
百円じゃなくて、王冠でした。- It wasn't a 100 yen coin, but a bottle cap.
君だけじゃなく僕も悪いんだ。- We are both to blame. ("Not just you, but I, too, am to blame.")
Is it perhaps that じゃなく cannot modify a copula, but can modify a verb or い-adjective? E.g.:-
私の自転車じゃなく兄の物に乗った。- I rode not my bicycle, but my brother's.
私の自転車じゃなくて、兄の物だ。- It is not my bicycle, but my brother's.
Or am I on completely the wrong track?
よろしくおねがいします、
小狼
