Re: verbs = nouns?

On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 08:42:28PM -0500, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
> From: "H. S. Teoh"
[snip]
> > > (1) [ta1 chu3 de fan4] wei4dao4 hen2 hao3
>
> What I find interesting is that I, as a non-native speaker, find the above
> sentence a little strange. The two nouns, "fan" and "weidao" juxtaposed
> maked me a bit squeamish. *I* could take:
>
> (2) ta1 zhu3 fan4 de wei4dao4 [implying "the smell of his cooking rice" or
> perhaps, "the smell of the rice he cooked"]
Interestingly, a native Chinese speaker would *avoid* saying this. Unless
they were commenting on the aroma of the kitchen, or something. But the
sentence I gave above is describing the delicious rice, not the cooking of
it.

> or
> (3) ta1zhu3 de fan4 de wei4dao4 [implying more explicitly "the smell of the
> rice he cooked"]
>
> but H.S. has already expressed discomfort at too many "de"s in a sentence.
Hmm. This one *could* get by, I suppose. It's really not as bad as I
might've made it seem. But I still prefer less "de"s in a sentence. :-)

> H.S., where do you weigh in on this? Your sentence makes me cringe. My third
> sentence makes you cringe. Where do you put the second sentence?
Well, now that I think about it again, perhaps (3) is acceptable. My
sentence could be a colloquial contraction (ie., dropping the "de" from
(3)), but I really can't tell because I'm just going by the gut feeling
developed through colloquial conversation, as opposed to formally studying
Chinese grammar. OTOH, (2) is something I usually wouldn't say, because it
means something else (it's referring to the cooking, not the rice), and
also, it seems odd to talk about the smell of one's act of cooking as
opposed to the taste of the food :-)


T

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