Why does the following sentence end in the て form?

Question

In a conversation between a student (Mike) and his teacher:

先生: ええ。[子供の]頃、私の家の近くに柔道をやっていてとても元気な子供がいてね。

the latter ends the sentence with the ~て form. Why is that so? I would expect the sentence to end with いました rather than いて, since he is speaking about a past time and he is ending all the other sentences with the polite marker です.

I found a related question with its answer about another sentence ending in ~て in a different context. In that case, the ~て ending is used to "imply that the speaker has something more to say". I'm not sure if it's also the case in the sentence we are discussing here, because the conversation continues after that. If this is another case of a sentence where it's implied that there's more to say, what would that extra information be? And if it's not the case, what else is going on here?

For your reference, this is the full conversation:

よろしくお願いします

Does this answer your question? What exactly is this でね construction? and て form at end of phrase but not being used for requests — naruto, May 30 '21 at 00:50
As you noted, 〜て generally implies the speaker has something more to say. But from the context, this sentence apparently has no such implication. In fact, 子供がいてね can be paraphrased as 子供がいたんですよ. 〜てね is a quite usual expression when you explain or describe something, and there is nothing implied in this usage. — user48754, May 30 '21 at 03:15

score -4 · Answer 1 · answered May 30 '21 at 02:15

At first, I wanted to answer like this. When the teacher is about forty years old and the student is about fifteen, the teacher will not use the polite form of 子供がいましてね but 子供がいてね. But when the student is twenty-five, the teacher will probably use 子供がいましてね.

But after reading the full conversation, I have found マイク using the very polite form of speech such as やっていらっしゃったそうですね. This kind of speech form makes me guess that マイク will be over twenty.

My answer is that this sentence sounds a little awkward among other sentences of polite form, or does not belong properly to the whole conversation.

Why does the following sentence end in the て form?

1 Answers1