29697
This is the sentence in question:

寂しくはあったけれど...

My impression is that it means "There was loneliness but" or "He/She/It was
lonely but". However I don't understand the grammar behind it. It looks to me
like 寂しい is in it's adverbial form but I didn't think that adverbs could be
subjects? It seems like 寂しく is modifying あった ?
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-12-05T19:52:48.540
29695
2015-12-05T20:28:25.080
10405
question
particle-は adverbs
Grammar behind adverbs + は
I think you have a number of things confused:

  1. True, adverbs can't be subjects. 
  2. But **寂しく isn't an adverb** , it's the -く form of an adjective, called the 連用形 in Japanese grammar.
  3. And **は isn't a subject marker**. It doesn't show any particular syntactic relationship; it can be placed on subjects, objects, or other things. It can even follow adverbs, although that's not what's going on here. It's true that は is _most commonly_ placed on subjects, but it appears on other kinds of constituents all the time.

What's going on here is that the adjective 寂しかった has been split up into two
pieces, 寂しく＋あった, so that the contrastive particle は can be put in between:

```

    　寂しかった　　→　寂しく＋あった
    　sabisik'atta　→　sabisiku＋atta
    
```

Now, normally you can't do that. You have to leave the あった contracted, because
long ago in the history of the Japanese language it fused with the -く form of
the adjective, which turned it into the inflectional form -かった rather than a
separate word.

But you can still use the two words separately if you need to put something in
between:

```

    　寂しかった＋ **は**　＝　寂しく＋ **は** ＋あった
```

In this case, は is adding contrastive meaning to the adjective 寂しかった. It isn't
marking a subject. This contrast goes well with the following けれど, and the
part you left out presumably tells you what it's contrasting with.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-12-05T20:21:56.630
29697
2015-12-05T20:28:25.080
2015-12-05T20:28:25.080
29695
answer