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What is the role of the な in bold in this sentence? Is it a nominalized だ?

考えれば考える程彼女がどういう女なのか分からなくなってきます。

永劫回帰
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1 Answers1

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Let's start with this part of the sentence:

彼女がどういう女だ

We'd like to add のだ, which includes the nominalizer の. When we do this, だ changes to な, as you suggest:

〜だ＋のだ　＝　〜なのだ

Here's what our sentence looks like so far:

彼女がどういう女なのだ

Since this has a question word, it's a question clause even without か. But we can add か anyway, and in this case it's required because of the following verb:

彼女がどういう女なのだか・・・

If this were a complete sentence, we'd want to delete だ before か:

彼女がどういう女なのか 　　　　←　か, not だか

But since the question clause is used as a complement for the following verb, deleting だ is optional:

考えれば考える程 [ 彼女がどういう女なのだか ] 分からなくなってきます。
考えれば考える程 [ 彼女がどういう女なのか ] 分からなくなってきます。

The last one is your sentence, so hopefully you can see how it's put together now.

  • Is deleting the だ actually optional here? This particular example sounds very strange to me with it. – rintaun Nov 23 '13 at 20:26
  • @rintaun I think native speakers say things like 〜だか分からない fairly often. What do you think is different about this example? –  Nov 23 '13 at 20:34
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    I've heard ～だか in embedded clauses many times, of course, but if I had to take a stab at what's making this sound unnatural to me, I would say it's the preceding なの. Remove either なの or だ and it sounds just fine to me. I'm certainly not a native speaker though, so that could just be a weird feature of my own interlanguage. – rintaun Nov 24 '13 at 00:26
  • @rintaun Darius Jahandarie [said the same thing in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/12321568#12321568), but it's easy to find lots of examples of people saying 〜なのだか. Do you think the examples I listed in chat sound unnatural? –  Nov 24 '13 at 00:28
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    ～～なのだか分からない is not only natural-sounding but also grammatical. –  Nov 24 '13 at 01:02
  • @rintaun The book (Kunio Kuwae's Manuel de Japonais Vol. 2 page 782) I got the sentence from clearly states that the なの is optional. However it doesn't mention the optional だ which doesn't appear in any of the examples : いつ何処でその本を買ったのか思い出せません。／私は医者として患者達がどういう言葉で自分達の病的状態を訴えるのかに注目しなした。／いつその本を読んだのかもう忘れました。 Nevertheless, those examples, we're not really relevant because since their subordinate clause ended with a verb there was no なの. But according to what was said above a だ could be inserted between の and か. – 永劫回帰 Nov 24 '13 at 13:17
  • I later came to the conclusion that as the question word (どういう) gets farther and farther away from the か in the syntax tree (i.e., deeper and deeper in embedded clauses), the less grammatical the +だ version sounds to me. But I am not a native speaker. – Darius Jahandarie Nov 24 '13 at 17:06
  • The technical answer is that simply, か requires 連体形 before it, and thus we have なのか (the な and の indicating 連体形). ((This is the same reason you have なのに～ etc.)) Using だか works as well for basically the same reason. Despite the fact that だ is unacceptable to use as a 連体形 in most cases, it works in others (including だか、だこと、だもの). //// Great answer though. – Kafka Fuura Nov 27 '13 at 01:23
  • One more note: なのだか vs. なのか or だか / I would guess that the former adds that なのだ sort of explanatory/declarative/emphasis nuance to the question, because it has an additional 連体形 that it does not need for the particle か. I don't encounter なのだか very often though, so this is more just speculation. – Kafka Fuura Nov 27 '13 at 01:34