Re: verbs = nouns?

From: "H. S. Teoh"

> True, true. But I still find the notion of adjectives in Chinese being a
> kind of "verb" rather hard to swallow. I guess I'm struggling with what is
> so "verb-like" about a Chinese adjective? I can't think of a good example
> that makes sense as both a verb and an adjective?
If you're thinking of the verb as an "action word", then, yes, it doesn't
make sense; you can't "dark" something. But as a *stative* verb (i.e.: "*be*
dark"), it works.

Tian1 hei1 le. It's (The sky's) gotten dark.

Again, as in my previous post, isn't "le" limited to verbs? "*Che1 le" (It's
become a car.) is not possible. "Hei1" could be used as a noun, but it can
also be used as an adjective, which means it can take on the verbal
qualities I've just stated. "Che1" is not adjectival (unless you want to
consider nouns in compound nouns adjectival, and let's not go there), so it
can't.

> It seems to me, now that I think a little more about it, that perhaps it
> *is* true that Chinese words are free-form, and changes category
> (noun/verb/adj) depending on its position in the sentence.
So far, so good.

> The only
> restrictions seems to be semantic; so it excludes things like using hong2
> (red) as a verb since you can't "red" something, although you can cause
> something to *become* red.
Stative verbs, by definition, are not transitive. Of course you can't "red"
something, but something can "be red" and thus, with a perfective particle,
"have become red".

> (I know, bad example 'cos this is valid in
> English. But I guess it's because in English, the concept of "to become"
> is implicitly added when "red" is used as a verb; whereas in Chinese, "to
> become" must be explicit. Chinese is perhaps more literal in such cases?)
If you interchanged "implicit" and "explicit" in this sentence, I would
agree with you.

Earlier:

>Actually, I didn't mean that there is an implicit copula. Just that if you
>find verbless sentences hard to grasp, a good way to think about it is
>that there are implicit copulas. But OTOH, I unconsciously think of
>implicit copulas when I'm thinking in English and writing about Chinese.
>When I'm thinking in Chinese, I find it rather difficult to explain why
>every sentence in English must have a verb
Though you distance yourself from it, for the sake of argument, I don't
think the implicit copula argument washes. If sentences with adjectives had
explicit copulas, they would behave differently.

Ta1 hen3 gao1. He's tall. (no "be" verb under this theory).

Ta1 shi4 hen3 gao1 de. Same meaning with different connotations ("be" verb
allowed)(not a great example)

take out the copula, and you get:

*Ta1 hen3 gao1 de.

And isn't implicit copula relatively rare in modern Chinese anyway? Back in
the old days, you juxtaposed two nouns for an X=Y sentence (X,Y). "Shi4",
originally a demonstrative "this", increasingly got tacked onto the Y (X,
this Y) and eventually became the modern-day copula. Beyond limited
phone-speak like "Wo3 Kou1 Dao4guang1." ("This is Douglas."), I find it hard
to come up with copula-less or, even less so, verbless sentences in Chinese.

Kou