I came across this in a video game about soccer/football.
メキシコ
Mexico
の
GEN
ディフェンス
defense
に
COM
悩む
struggle
デンマーク
Denmark
。
.
早い
quick
クロスボール
cross ball
から
from
チャンス
chance
を
ACC
掴み
seize
たい
VOL
ところ
place
だ
be
。
.
What's throwing me off is that structurally the first sentence looks like a bare noun phrase ("Denmark, who are struggling against Mexico's defense") but it's the main clause of the sentence ("Denmark are struggling against Mexico's defense"). What are the semantic considerations here? Why is it not デンマークはメキシコのディフェンスに悩む?
Strictly speaking, this makes a relative clause modifying Denmark. My guess is it's just a sentence fragment: "Denmark, who struggle with Mexico's defense." Ungrammatical in formal Japanese, but common enough in speech, like if it's imitating a sports caster. Another, equally plausible possibility is that they've just moved the subject to the end of the sentence for emphasis, which would not involve a subject marker. This feels pragmatically more likely to me, but it would depend on the surrounding context.
If I heard this sentence spoken, the prosody would make it obvious.
I have a friend who is a linguistics professor whose primary research is exactly on the tendency in Japanese towards bare nouns or copulas vs other types of predicates. She's pretty busy but I'll ask her for her explanation on this next time I talk to her, in a couple weeks.
Just giving an update so I don't totally let it slide...
My friend essentially gave me an hour and a half impromptu presentation on this, including pulling up her recent book to show me more examples (I definitely asked the right person!). I took a bunch of notes and need to summarize them for you.
