Are 俯かせる and 俯ける the same?

Question

そしてそのまま顔をうつむかせ、「ぅえ……っ、ぇ……っ」と嗚咽を漏らし始める。

そして、ウサギの耳付きフードをきゅっと握って顔をうつむけ、目元を隠すようにしながらたどたどしく言ってくる。

Hi. Can we use 俯かせる and 俯ける interchangeably in the above two example? Are 俯かせる and 俯ける the same? Thank you.

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 15 '20 at 01:43

3

Here, you are seeing two different verbs:

うつむく: godan, intransitive (連用形/masu-stem = うつむき)
うつむける: ichidan, transitive (連用形/masu-stem = うつむけ)

It's the same pattern found in 開く/開ける, 進む/進める, etc. うつむかせる is the causative form of うつむく. So yes, うつむかせる and うつむける are similar, and I see no big semantic difference between them.

However, I personally feel 顔をうつむかせる is unnecessarily wordy, and うつむける is simply uncommon. You can say just うつむく without any object, and this is by far the most common way of saying this in modern Japanese (e.g., そのままうつむいて嗚咽を漏らし始める).

I checked BCCWJ, and there was no example of をうつむかせ(る). There were several examples of をうつむけ(る), but many of them were from old novelists born before 1950.

answered Apr 15 '20 at 01:43

naruto

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I don't think 顔をうつむかせる is wordy or うつむける uncommon. If you google "顔をうつむかせ" and "顔をうつむけ", you can find numerous examples. – goldbrick Apr 15 '20 at 11:46
@goldbrick I'm not saying they are unnatural, and I was rather surprised that BCCWJ had no example of 顔をうつむかせる. Still, I have to say google hit counts are less credible than corpora. – naruto Apr 15 '20 at 12:57
The number of hits Google shows at the top is not to be trusted, of course, but if you actually look at the snippets of text (about 100+ (not checked for false positives) for each of 「顔をうつむかせ」 and 「顔をうつむけ」), some from published books, they are authentic Japanese, written by native speakers just like those in BCCWJ. I'm not contesting the claim that うつむく is more common than the other two. What I'm trying to say is that 「顔をうつむかせる」 and 「うつむける」 perhaps shouldn't be dismissed as "unnecessarily wordy" and "simply uncommon". – goldbrick Apr 16 '20 at 13:51
By opting for "顔をうつむかせる", the writer maybe paying or drawing more attention to person's face, or doing so for prosodic reasons, or possibly simply that's what comes naturally to them. – goldbrick Apr 16 '20 at 13:51
Also I think BCCWJ's data is vastly biased toward older novelists. It says a majority of total sampled words comes from the 書籍 category, for which the target period is 1971-2005. Writers born in 1950, for example, would have been starting out their careers around 1971 and have had a lot of output to be sampled by 2005. By contrast many of younger generations weren't even born at the beginning of or well into the target period. I searched「うつむき」 on the corpus, and the results with respect to 生年代 were pretty much the same -- a preponderance of writers born in the 1950's or earlier. – goldbrick Apr 16 '20 at 13:53
@goldbrick ですから別にこれらが不自然だとは全く思ってないですし、検索すれば用例がたくさん出るのも至極当然だと思います。それでも「普通は"うつむく"で十分」「不必要に言葉が多い」「単純に頻度が低い」という私の印象が覆るわけではありません。どうBCCWJで検索しても「うつむく」と「うつむける」には数十倍の頻度の差があり、それは私の感覚とも合致しますので、この質問に対してその事実を指摘しておくことは妥当だと思います。「うつむいた」と「顔をうつむかせた」の差に関しては、後者は「文学的で長い表現で、普通わざわざこんな言い方しないな」と思います（実際小説の用例が殆どです）が、「顔を強調している」のような意味の面での差は個人的には感じとれません。 – naruto Apr 18 '20 at 00:57

Are 俯かせる and 俯ける the same?

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