A question today concerns 思われる, the receptive form of 思う. It is a good question because I think this is something that can be confusing, partly because of the way the receptive is explained as passive (which works – as a loose translation – part of the time but not all of it and completely messes up the structure) and partly because Japanese just puts things a little differently from English:

Maybe it’s silly, but I have a hard time differentiating between the receptive form of 思う and the verb 思われる. They seem similar to me. In which cases would you use the former, and in which cases would you use the latter?

Here is my reply:

This really isn’t silly at all because it can seem confusing at first and doesn’t get well explained.

Since 思う means “think”, 思われる means “receive being thought”, which works out in English as “seem” or “appear”. Funnily, English sometimes puts it the other way up: “give the impression”, whereas Japanese puts it “receive the perception”.

At times its meaning is very close to 思う for obvious reasons. “It seems (to me) to be a lemon” is much the same in practice as “(I) think it’s a lemon”. And as in English, the 思われる “it seems (to me)…” version is less direct/assertive than the 思う “(I) think…” version.

However, at other times 思われる does not imply “me” as the originator of the received thought at all and just means “It is thought to be”:

バクテリアの種類と思われる
“It is thought to be a species of bacteria.”

Here the English passive is the most natural translation and is fine provided we don’t let it affect our perception of the particles.

What we must remember is that receptive (so-called “passive”) constructions are made up of two verbs that always have two separate subjects. Which is why it is so damaging to our understanding to see them as a single “conjugated verb”.

The と links the idea or perception (that it is a species of bacteria) to 思う, which has the implicit subject of “people in general” (French “on”). The subject of れる is whatever “it” is that is thought to be a species of bacteria.

Some dictionaries list 思われる meaning “seems” as a separate word from the receptive form of 思う but I think it is clear that it is always actually receptive 思う.

The dictionaries are not actually “wrong” in this. Whether we call something “a different word” or not is simply a matter of cross-language explanation strategy and the strategy of a dictionary is somewhat different from the strategy of teaching/learning structure.

A dictionary’s proper aim is to give people, in a reasonably concise way, a picture of what a word might mean (in English) in a particular circumstance. The implied user is someone reading a piece of text and wanting to know how it would read in English.

The strategy of structure-study is to see what is actually going on in the Japanese, and the implied user is someone who wants to become proficient at understanding the language – not just at putting it into the nearest available English.

In general, the question of “same word” and “different word” in cases like this is a non-question. It implies that Japanese cuts up into units called words that could theoretically be spaced off from each other as in European languages.

This is not in fact the case, and if you read Japanese school grammars (for Japanese children) you will see that Japanese employs a number of terms for the most granular units of the language, but “word” or any close equivalent is not one of them.

This is not an eccentric manner of description but reflects the reality that Japanese lexical units are much more amoeba-like than European words.

We should also note that the confusion between the “two” uses arises because person having the thought that is being received is different in the two cases. This person, if explicitly mentioned would be marked by に as the “giver” of the received action always is.

So

バクテリアの種類と思われる

= ∅が∅に　バクテリアの種類と思われる

The が-marked ∅ is of course the thing thought to be a species of bacteria,  and the に-marked ∅ is “people in general” – the usage is exactly equivalent to French on pense (one thinks = people think or in the more usual passive English “it is thought”).

When “I” is the implicit に-marked thinker, the visible structure is of course identical and we have to understand which it is from context.

Just as:

わたしはウナギだ

can in fact mean “I am an eel” but in the usual context, doesn’t.

In both cases the difference between the two meanings lies solely in the identity of the に-marked zero particle.

And if the concept of the zero particle isn’t crystal clear, please watch this video immediately, because it is the very foundation-stone of Japanese.

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