In the sentence "nanika osagashi desu ka?" (Are you looking for something), in
which tense is "osagashi"? Why is it not osagashimasu?
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2023-06-20T13:57:23.627
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2023-06-21T15:16:19.913
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question
verbs tense japanese-to-english honorifics renyōkei
The tense of osagashi
“Osagasi” in this sentence is noun so it’s irrelevant to tense. I think the
sentence is more like “Are you in search of something?” The verb in this
sentence is “desu(ka)”, which is present tense.
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2023-06-20T16:31:32.417
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First off: it seems that by "tense" you really mean _conjugation_ - the
complete set of changes (inflections) made to a verb in order to indicate
tense (past/present/future), aspect (finished/ongoing/repeatedly
occurring/etc.), mood (active/passive/hypothetical/command/etc.), etc. I don't
think you are really confused about whether the sentence refers to past,
present or future, but simply about why there is no "masu" ending.

The sentence does mean "Are you searching for something?" although of course
the "you" is implied. (We could also suppose that the implied subject is,
e.g., "the thing that you're doing".) In a hyper-literal translation - to show
how the grammar works - we might say something like "do [you] exist in the
state of searching for something?". It means this because "desu" is a copula
(one of the functions that the verb "to be" has in English), and "osagashi" is
essentially "searching" in a noun-like way (like, the state/condition of
searching), thus "osagashi" + "desu" forms a verb that means something like
"to be searching".

* * *

In case you feel like digging in to way more gory details than are actually
needed in order to understand it:

The verb [お]{o}[探]{saga}[す]{su} means to search for something1 (the "o" is
just an honorific here2), and [お]{o}[探]{saga}[し]{shi} is its i-stem, or "masu-
stem". However, the i-stem is not a proper conjugation of a verb by itself.
Rather, in general it's something more like a gerund (i.e., an abstract noun
that describes some event) in English.3 This is noun-like, but has more
limited uses than ordinary nouns.

Forms like this _can_ go before [で]{de}[す]{su} - however, these cases don't
work quite the same way (from an English perspective) as putting an ordinary
noun before [で]{de}[す]{su}. [探]{saga}[し]{shi}[で]{de}[す]{su} isn't "is (equal
to/an instance of) searching (the act, as an abstract concept)", but rather
"is (exists) searching (a description of the current condition of the
subject)".

This happens because **Japanese doesn't really have a direct equivalent of the
English "is"** (which is highly ambiguous). [で]{de}[す]{su} is a contraction of
[で]{de} (the particle) + [あ]{a}[り]{ri}[ま]{ma}[す]{su} (polite form of
[あ]{a}[る]{ru}). That is, the underlying verb is really "to exist", and then we
describe _where or how_ the subject exists, using a で-marked indirect object.
Alternately, we can say that this で is a connector that can convert a gerund
(noun-like) into a gerundive4 (adjective/adverb-like) and then join it to the
following verb.

We _could_ instead attach the "masu" ending5 like you describe, and get
roughly the same meaning. However, that then has to be the final verb; we
can't put "desu" after that (it would be sort of like saying "are you be
looking for something?").

1In English, "to search for" is a phrasal verb; we think of the "for" as being
part of the verb itself. When we "search" in English, the direct object is the
place (especially a container) where we search, and the indirect object is
what we hope to find. "for" functions as a marker for indirect objects, and in
English we can't just skip direct objects for transitive verbs. However,
"search for" lets us swap the objects around (and now we need something like
"in" to mark a place for the search). The Japanese verb most commonly works
like "search for", rather than like "search", although my dictionary suggests
it can work both ways with a bit of finagling.

2However, maybe you misheard a particle-を before the verb? There should be
one, since [何]{nani}[か]{ka} is the direct object here - per the previous
footnote.

3In certain limited cases, this form also becomes a separate, ordinary noun -
for example [呼]{よ}び meaning "call" as a noun (an invitation, act of calling,
etc.) derived from 呼ぶ (the verb "to call"). Anyway, I don't want to say that
it actually _is_ a gerund, because European grammatical terms were designed
for European languages.

4Again, this is an approximation; I don't want to assert that it's correct to
use terms like this.

5Getting _really_ pedantic, [ま]{ma}[す]{su} (or sometimes [い]{i}[ま]{ma}[す]{su})
isn't a "conjugation" in the way that "-ing" or "-ed" is in English; it's an
actual auxiliary verb. In modern Japanese it would basically never be used on
its own, but it commonly gets attached to i-stems of other verbs. The reason
we don't use [で]{de} here is because the meaning of the verb is more like "do"
than "exist", so we modify it with a description of _what_ is done rather than
_how_. This is similar to how "suru verbs" work.
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