73551
> はい、先生。家はあらかた **壊されっちまってたです** が、マグルたちが群れ寄ってくる前に、無事に連れ出しました。  
>  No sir. The house was almost completely destroyed but I took him out safely
> before the muggles started to crowd around.

I'm assuming that 壊されっちまってた is simply colloquial for 壊されてしまっていた, but I'm
puzzled by the です part. It was always my understanding that you could not add
です onto a verb to make it polite. I would have expected to see 壊されてしまっていましたが.

What is implied by this use of です? Is it someone realising that they used the
wrong verb ending to add politeness and then compensating by adding です? Is it
a regional variation? Something else?

If it helps, the character speaking is Hagrid from Harry Potter. He uses
pretty colloquial speech in the original book.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-12-18T17:37:52.730
73545
2019-12-19T02:32:40.237
7944
question
grammar
Use of です after plain form verb conjugation
In the standard grammar, `verb + です` is clearly wrong. It should have been
either 壊されっちまってたんですが or 壊されっちまってましたが.

However, in fiction, you can see broken, peculiar or dialectal Japanese spoken
by various types of character. This sentence is indeed a little broken, and
that's where we can notice this person is trying to be polite but not very
good at speaking in a sophisticated manner.

This type of misused です is also characteristic of [stereotypical gaijin
speech](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/65033/5010), and it's also common
as a キャラ語尾 for fictional girls (see
[this](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/65022/5010)).
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-12-19T02:32:40.237
73551
2019-12-19T02:32:40.237
5010
73545
answer