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The sentence is this one:

おむすびがころころ転が穴におちてしまいました

Why is it 転がり instead of 転がる?

Also for a bonus question, I read in this forum site that てしまう means to make emphasis on the ending of the action or for some embarrassing situation. Which is the meaning on that example?

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    https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/12970/%e5%a7%8b%e3%81%be%e3%82%8b-%e5%a7%8b%e3%81%be%e3%82%8a-is-there-a-rule-of-making-nouns-from-verbs-besides-nominalization maybe it could help – Felipe Chaves de Oliveira Jun 22 '17 at 20:56
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    'Ended up' is often a good translation of てしまいました. The rice ball rolled over and over and ended up falling down a hole. For the verb question see: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/23789/%e3%81%a6-versus-combining-form-for-joining-clauses – user3856370 Jun 22 '17 at 21:20
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    Related too: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/34407/why-is-this-sentence-not-separated/34409#34409 – Tommy Jun 23 '17 at 00:01

1 Answers1

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To answer the first question, it is not in dictionary form because in formal Japanese, or generally often in writing, it is customary to connect two sentences using the "pre-masu form" that is, the -masu form without the ”ます” (for example: 食べる → 食べ、 行く → 行き、 and in your case 転がる -> 転がり).

So in your case you could see this as the equivalent of putting an "and" after the verb in English.

To answer the second question, as pointed out in a comment one way of thinking about the -てしまう form sometimes is to see it as "Ended up...". Moreover in this case we could imagine that "falling down a hole" represents a somehow undesirable situation since after that point the rice ball might be lost. This however, might depend on the context of course.

Tommy
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