I’m reading a children’s Christmas book. Can someone maybe explain the grammar of this to me?
夜になったら、世界中の子どもたちにプレゼントをくばりにいくのです。
I am reading it as “When it becomes night, he will go distribute presents to all the children in the world.”
However the verb くばる+に is confusing me. I would’ve expected くばっていく. But there’s also the のです normalizing the verb… and I don’t know why.
Would anyone be kind enough to help me understand the grammar behind this?
Thank you so much ☺️
6 comments
its the にいく Stem of verbs. 食べに行く go to eat 配りに行く go to hand out
配って行く would mean to hand out first, and then go after which alters the meaning completely
When you say “go to do something”, the thing you’re going to do would be like your destination.
So, in JP, we follow the stem of the verb with に, and then say いく.
Its like, 食べにいく”I’m going to eat” instead of 食べていく”I’ll eat and go”
It’s not really nominalising the verb, it’s just the level of formality. From formal to informal it would be something like this:
– 配りに行きます。
– 配りに行くのです。
– 配りに行くんです。
The 〜んです form is also more like an explanation than the more affirmative “just the verb” form
Edit: formatting
くばり is the continuative form of くばる, and the continuative form often becomes a noun, like to-infinitive in English. I mean, くばりにいく roughly means someone will go in order to distribute something to someone else.
Japanese in some way is very similar to Cantonese. I can say “(doing this job)’s man” which actually means “a/the man who is doing this job”. Here の besides turning いく from “go” to “going”, will also give the meaning that “the one who is going to do something”. In English ‘s has “possessive” meaning. But の doesn’t always have possessive implications. So, the sentence probably means something like:
He is the one who is going to distribute presents to many kids of the world when it becomes night time.