What’s the function of に in sentence: 子犬が寝ているところを写真に撮った。

3 comments

1. In case of とる, we use を with content and に with a medium, which can be photo, video and so on. The difference between を and に sometimes can be quite vague, but there is a small scale.

   Look at some simpler situation first like “to throw a ball to (someone)”. You can see that such target is more optional, we can throw a ball to the wall, or even simply to throw it without any aim. And ball is more crucial, because our action can’t be done without throwing something itself. Such situation is quite similar to intransitive actions like “to smile”. We can smile just because we are in a good mood, but we can also smile at someone, and such target would be also said with に. In case of taking a photo it’s more tricky, because I’m not sure we can actually do that without any medium. So both content and medium are present, similar to other ditransitive actions like “to write (content and surface)”, “to give (what and to whom)”, ” “to tell (what and to whom)” and so on. If you pay more attention to it, you can notice that direct object is more about content of our action, so using 子犬が寝ているところ with it becomes quite natural too.

   It’s very common situation that we want to describe our verb with several nouns, and your 子犬が寝ているところ at the core is a simple noun ところ in relative clause. And how crucial such noun is more or less determines を->に->で scale. Notice that we can add even more nouns like “to write a letter to (someone) at my home”, and “my home” would be even less important here and used with で. Such importance quite often can be judged simply by our feeling, try to omit it and see if it’s still fine. “I bought” provokes to ask “bought what?”, and similarly “I wrote”. Omission here isn’t very natural. “I wrote a letter” is better, but quite often we still want to ask “to whom?”. However, “I wrote a letter to (some person)” sounds fine, and it’s completely optional to say where we did it.

2. >子犬が寝ているところを写真に撮った。

   Not a definitive answer, but I would read this as…

   “I recorded **to** (**に**) a photograph the scene of a puppy sleeping”.

3. > What I don’t understand is function of に after noun 写真, and the sentence as a whole feels off. Situation, were に and を are swapped (子犬が寝ているところに写真を撮った) feels more natural, since particle を is directly before verb, but then again, it alters the function of ところ.

   Actually, “〜を” before “〜に” is the default, dare I say only acceptable word order for transformative verbs in many cases.

   – “部屋を綺麗にする。” = “I will make the room clean.”
   – “困った顔を笑顔に変える。” = “I will change your worried face into a smile.”
   – “君を僕を好きにならせる。” = “I will make you love me.”.

   You’re right that with verbs of giving, “〜に” tends to be put before “〜を” but this is a transformative verb, the scene is after all turned into a picture.

   The sentence does mean “I took a picture of my puppy sleeping.”, but English simply expresses this in a very different way, a more literal way to translate it would be. “I recorded the scene of my puppy sleeping onto a picture.” As in the scene is transformed into a picture.

   A thing about Japanese is that the most prominent, vocal information tends to be placed at the back of the sentence, which is usually not the receiver, but the thing given, but in verbs of giving this word order can easily be inverted and the receiver can be put at the back too.

   But with verbs of transformation this option often no longer exists. I don’t think “綺麗に部屋をする” is even allowed and if it be, it’s a very unusual word order, with verbs of transformation, which also accept i-adjectives in this place in the ku-form, the endpoint of the transformation has to be before the verb.