What is これ the subject of in this sentence?

Question

Dad has just given a useless answer to a question. Next we have:

これが情けないことに、父ヒロシの答えなのだから、がっくりである。
This, pathetically, is dad's answer, and it is disappointing.

Not sure if I'm parsing this correctly. On my first reading I tried to make これ the subject of 情けない but I couldn't make any sense out of it. The comma made me think that これが情けないことに was a single unit. If this is the case, how can I understand this construction? How does これが fit in?

I abandoned that line of thought and decided that これ actually went with the middle part of the sentence, i.e. これが父ヒロシの答えなのだ and that 情けないことに was more of a parenthetical comment. Is this the correct parsing? If so, why is the comma placed where it is? I know that commas don't really serve any grammatical purpose in Japanese but this one seems really misleading/confusing.

Answer 1

You are right in that これが is the subject of 父ヒロシの答えなのだ.

情けないことに works as a sentence adverb that modifies the whole sentence. Generally this is the case with phrases ending in ことに. Some examples:

• 幸運なことにPS5を買うことができた Luckily I was able to buy PS5.
• 彼は残念なことに試験に落ちてしまった Unfortunately he failed the exam.

In terms of translation, what is... or to be... may be similar sometimes. (e.g. what was unfortunate.)

I guess a source of confusion is that in English you can use enclose such phrases with commas, but in Japanese doing the same is a little odd even if not impossible (i.e. in this case using "、情けないことに、").