ちょっと君に話しがある I saw this sentence in my downloaded deck of cards. Does it make
sense.

Why does it feel like "You have a little bit of a story in you". How do you
interpret this? What does the に? In other words, is it a target particle for
the ある or 話.

The way I see it it should be broken up as " **君に話** " ＋ " _がある_ " not
**君に話がある**
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-25T03:21:47.497
14603
2014-02-27T01:06:04.477
3754
question
grammar particles
君に話しがある How does this work?
に in this case goes with ある. 話し = "something to tell you, conversaton" is just
a noun.

Another example is 君にプレゼントがある = I have a present for you.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-25T09:33:45.663
14610
2014-02-25T09:33:45.663
4754
14603
answer
In this case, 「に」 is not a location marker. It indicates the receiving end of
an action, offer, request, order, etc. So, 「[君]{きみ} = "you"」 is on the
receiving end here.

「[話]{はな}し」 does not mean "a story" here. Rather, it means "a word" as in "to
have a word with someone".

「～～に話しがある」 should be remembered as a set phrase meaning "would like a word
with ~~".

Thus, 「ちょっと君に話しがある。」 means "I'd like a word with you."
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-26T00:08:20.797
14622
2014-02-26T00:08:20.797
14603
answer
You cannot break it up as

> *[君に話]がある

since Japanese does not allow postpositional phrases to modify nouns without a
の. So the phrase should be parsed

> [君に][話が]ある

You might find it strange that the 君に modifies ある, not 話, since in English the
most natural parse would be "I have a [present for you]". However, English
actually also allows the above parse, e.g. "[For you], I have [a present]".
This might help you to understand the Japanese parse intuitively.

What if you wanted 君に to modify 話 instead? **Syntactically** you could,
turning it into

> *[君への話]がある

(にの is not allowed, and becomes への), but this is not very natural. The reason
is that these postpositional phrases with の mostly modify **definite** nouns,
and do not work well with 話, which is indefinite (a story, a talk).

However, changing the noun a bit, you could construct a meaningful pair
highlighting the difference:

> 君にプレゼントがある I have a present (indefinite) for you  
>  君へのプレゼントはあそこにある My present for you (definite) is over there
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-02-27T00:37:03.487
14638
2014-02-27T01:06:04.477
2014-02-27T01:06:04.477
1073
1073
14603
answer