A bit confused about て -form and [verb] たい (want to do something)

4 comments

1. It’s just 〜ている→〜ていたい

2. ていたい is ている in which いる gets conjugated to たい form

3. So, it *is* the て form being used in these ていたい constructions. If you don’t care about the grammar details and just want the usage details, skip to the end. I will put a line like this:

   ——-

   So, what’s going on here? (A note on a word: inflection just means to change the form of the word to indicate different grammatical things. I run, I *ran*. That’s inflection.)

   Well, let’s talk about the regular -たい form firstj. The ます stem, as you call it, is a specific inflection of verbs/adjectives – now, we can try to characterise what this form/inflection ‘means’ in English in various ways by looking at its usage, but I think its easiest to gloss the name of this stem literally, and say it is the *stem that attaches to inflecting words*; a shorter name for this might be the conjunctive stem, but sometimes the て form is called the conjunctive form, and I don’t want us to get confused. That it is the stem that inflected words attach to is the important takeaway here.

   What does that mean in practice?

   Well, let’s take a verb in its ます stem form, like 泳ぎ(およぎ ) ‘to swim.’ What do we do with the verb in this form? Well, we can attach ます for starters, 泳ぎます – masu can of course inflect, 泳ぎません, 泳ぎませんでした, 泳ぎましょう, etc. We can also attach たい, 泳ぎたい. たい *also* inflects, fex. you can say 泳ぎたかった ‘wanted to swim,’ 泳ぎたくなかった ‘did not want to swim,’ etc. The key takeaway for this part is that words like たい, ます themselves are inflectable words – *they* are attaching to the stem. And, in fact, if you have a string like 泳ぎたくない, that -たく- part *is this same stem*, and *nai* is its own separate inflecting ‘word.’ So then in たくなかった, what you actually have is たい in this stem form, followed by ない in this stem form (actually this is なく), followed by the past tense form of ある (it becomes なかった instead of なくあった, this is a historical contraction like in English *can’t*.) – that being あった. (ある also had a completely different inflection way back when, but it’s not really important for us to break down あった.)

   So, as you can see, it is called the stem that inflecting forms attach to for good reason.

   So, the -て form. You’ve probably been essentially taught that the て form attaches to the ます stem. So for 泳ぎ we have 泳ぎて. Now, wait a minute, I hear you say, I thought the ます stem was the ‘stem that inflected words attach to.’ Well, yes. And, historically, て is *exactly that*, another morpheme that inflected. But, that’s not really important for us, instead, you can just think of て as a particle that follows this stem.

   It might be worth pointing out here that our ます stem behaves a lot like a noun, in that it can form compound words (so 食べ -> 食べ残し ‘leftovers’) and have other verbs follow it, eg. 食べすぎる. In contrast, the form that goes at the end of sentences (泳ぐ) and that you put before nouns (泳ぐ人 ‘swimming person’) is a lot less noun-y, like if you want to make 泳ぐ the subject of a sentence, *normally* you have to nominalize it with の or こと, so eg. 泳ぐのはいいことですよ ‘to swim is good for you,’ you can’t just say およぐは… (I mean, you can, but this is really a topic for when you’re a bit further along.) With 泳ぎ, you can just use it without の or こと, eg. ‘泳ぎはあまり速くない,’ ‘I’m not a very fast swimmer.’

   Anyway, back to て. Your textbook/teacher/etc. should basically run you through the uses, but the [Wiktionary page](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%A6#Etymology_2) has a pretty good overview. For our purposes, we just want to break down ていたい. So, in a sequence like 食べたい, what’s going on? Well, we have our ます/inflecty-attach stem of 食べる, + the て particle, and then we have the ます/attach-y form of いる, followed by たい.

   ———-

   So, what we have are two parallel structures for expressing wanting to do something, we can take our examples as 食べたい and 食べていたい. Why have two/what’s the difference? Well, remember, ます stem + て + いる has a continuative meaning, it refers to ongoing events. So, when you say 食べたい, you are just saying you want to eat; when you say 食べていたい, you’re saying you want to be eating. The basic たい construction without いる is far more common for the majority of verbs, with ていたい having a more restricted set of uses – usually, it might imply that you were interrupted and you want to continue onwards with X, you might gloss this with ‘keep on X-ing,’ or it might mean the difference between wanting to do something at a certain point (2年で卒業したい; I want to graduate in two years) vs. by a certain point (eg. 2年で卒業していたい I want to have graduated by the time two years is up; 20代で知っていたい、と思うこと; things I wish I’d known in my 20s), or it might just refer to an action that you want to specifically be in a continual state of doing (eg. 見つめていたい – I want to stare, 笑っていたい , I want to laugh, 遅くまで寝ていたいですか do you want to sleep late?.)

4. 食べる＝eat

   食べたい＝want to eat

   食べている＝eating (or in the state in the present, i.e. “have eaten”; “had eaten” would be 食べていった)

   食べていたい＝want to be eating

   the last one there is not super common, if you just mean “want to eat” then don’t conjugate to the present continuing before adding たい just add it directly to the verb