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I came across this as part of a larger sentence:

あのせんせいってそういう人らしいね。

I am getting the gist of "that teacher seems like a decent person", but what is this って form noun construction? Is it just a contraction for an implied verb?

Rathony
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David S
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    Why did you translate そういう as "decent"? – chocolate Aug 30 '16 at 15:04
  • I didn't. I translated 人らしい as decent. – David S Aug 30 '16 at 15:06
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    It's そういう人+らしい, "seems to be such a person." 「そういう」="such, that kind of"「らしい」="seems like" – chocolate Aug 30 '16 at 15:08
  • @chocolate I translated it the same as you, but when I look in jdict it does have an entry 人らしい which it claims means "like a decent person". It's not in my dictionaries and I assume it is nonsense. Am I missing something? – user3856370 Aug 30 '16 at 15:12
  • Yeah, I got that from my dictionary. – David S Aug 30 '16 at 15:14
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    It's not parsed as 「そういう+人らしい」 but 「そういう人+らしい」. It's almost the same as 「そういう人+のようだ」「そういう人+みたいだ」"It seems like he is that kind of person." そういう is an adjectival phrase, so it can modify a noun, not an adjective. Here, it modifies the noun 人. We do have a word 「人らしい」, meaning "humane" ≂「人間らしい」「人間[味]{み}のある」, but it's an i-adjective. The adjectival そういう can't modify an i-adjective 人らしい, so you can't parse it as 「そういう+人らしい」. We usually use the i-adjective 人らしい like this: 「人らしい[行]{おこな}い」「人らしい[振]{ふ}る[舞]{ま}い」「人らしい感情」 – chocolate Aug 30 '16 at 16:01
  • そういう人 (lit. "that" kind of person) or そっちの人 (lit. a person in "there") is sometimes an euphemistic way of referring to a yakuza. If そういう obviously refers to something different in previous sentences, forget this comment. – naruto Aug 30 '16 at 17:09
  • Thanks for the clarification on parsing out Japanese sentence structure. @naruto, there is no yakuza link with this sentence, but what a great thing to know! – David S Aug 30 '16 at 18:21

1 Answers1

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This って is simply a more colloquial form of the topic marker は.

user3856370
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  • 日本語でコメント書いたから、英語で説明してくれてたのね・・気づかなくて、コメント書き直してしまった。。お手数かけてすみませんでした。ややこしくてごめんね～！ – chocolate Aug 30 '16 at 16:24
  • @chocolate No problem. Your explanations are very much appreciated. – user3856370 Aug 30 '16 at 16:47