/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>32798904
>Au au, if every building in Hinamizawa has wood doors, how did the yamainu avoid getting gassed themselves?

>「探偵役であるエリカも犯人ではない」
Understanding this sentence should be obvious, but I'm going to go autism mode. Breaking the sentence down with word-to-word translation it'd be like:
>Detective-role is Erika.too culprit.as is-not
Breaking the sentence down into the parts of speech:
>Noun verb noun.too noun.as verb
With the two verbs that means there's two clauses, meaning there's two things that happen
>Erika is the detective role
>Erika is also not the culprit
In layman's terms, a copula (both verbs in the red statement are) is basically just a way of equating two things together. There are some exceptions of course, like you can assume most of the time if there's a conflict in meanings words are going to keep their original aspects: ("All squares are rectangles" =/= "All rectangles are squares"). The meaning of both "the detective role" and "not the culprit" now includes Erika as well.
The above simpifications of the sentence
Furthermore, Beatrice has stated that there are only 18 people on the island, and listed them all including Erika. Thus, we can assume that the word "Erika" in both the red statement and the rest of the game board are the same person.
This whole analysis is grossly simplified and I don't know Japanese grammar as well as some L2 speakers might, so there's probably some shit wrong.
>QED Erika is both the detective and not the culprit, and the detective role is filled by Erika.

tl;dr if you see something like a "to be" word even in translation, it's probably generally impossible to argue as wordplay.