Re: Results of Poll by Email No. 27

Andreas writes:

>Quoting João Ricardo Oliveira <hokstein@...>:
>
>>  I'm sorry, I made a mistake. "Sentence" is the wrong concept. In
>>  Portuguese,
>>  we call it _oração_, which is a statement that expresses an action, a
>>  characteristic of something, a state, a continuity of state or a change
>>  of
>>  state. I don't know what it is called in English.
>
>I don't think this holds either; there's many languages that lack a
>verb "to be"
>(a copula), which express things like "the stone is red" by "the stone red" or
>similar. Can't think of a good natlang example right now, but Kalini Sapak has
>sentences like _tahuku aguzama_ "the men (are/were) warriors".
I think you raise two different issues here insofar as Chinese is
concerned. "The stone red" - "Shitou hong" lacks a copula per se, but
that's because "hong" is considered a stative verb: "to be red". So
many of what are "adjectives" in English function as verbs in
Chinese. (Japanese operates similarly; while you can throw in a
copula in formal speech ("Ishi ga akai *desu*."), the informal form
sans copula ("Ishi ga akai.") is perfectly grammatically acceptable
(in fact, you can inflect adjectives for tense in Japanese).

Modern Chinese has a copula - "shi", but it originally meant "this",
and evolved into the copula from the custom of juxtaposing nouns.
Dropping the copula is still quite common in sentences like "Ni
jisui?" "How old are you."; or on the phone, "Wei, ni hao. Wo Kou
Daoguang." "Hello? Hi, I'm Douglas."

Kou