Re: verbs = nouns?

On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 11:02:21AM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> > Hmm. To me, hong2 and kuai4 are just plain & simple adjectives. To make
> > them into nouns, you'd have to compound them with something like tu4
> > (degree), eg.  kuai4tu4 (degree of fastness, ie., speed). I'm not sure how
> > they may be used as verbs, except perhaps for something like "kuai4dian3"
> > -- "hurry up!"; but I think of it as literally meaning "be more fast!" so
> > "kuai4" would still be an adjective.
>
> But what's the verb in that case?
An implicit imperative copula. AFAIK, Chinese does not require every
sentence to have a verb.

>  Treating adjectives as a subclass of
> verbs (stative verbs) allows us to account for sentences like kuai4 dian3
> without having to posit a kind of sentence that doesn't contain a verb.
Is there any good reason to avoid this, though? I personally find the
notion of "kuai4" being verbal rather foreign -- when I say "kuai4 dian3"
I think of it as a contraction of "I want you to be faster": there's an
implicit copula there.

> It also accounts neatly for the behavior of "Adj de Noun" constructions,
> which are then just a noun modified by a relative clause.  We can then
> explain that stative verbs are the ones which can omit "de", often
> with idiomatic meaning.
Hmm, interesting. Sounds like a rather periphrastic way of explaining it,
IMHO :-) I'd like to see a few examples to understand more of what you're
getting at...?

> As a verb, kuai4 means "be fast", of course.
Hmm. I find it quite strange to use kuai4 as a verb. How would you explain
something like:
        gang3 kuai4 pa3 shu1 du2 wan2
(quickly finish reading the book)?

> But none of this means that Chinese nouns and verbs are interchangeable
> in general.
[snip]

Right. With some words, yes, but in general, no. But of course, I'm also
not so sure Chinese fits well into IE-based linguistic analyses either. A
lot of constructions in Chinese, to me, are just hard to rationalize using
the IE model of adjectives/adverbs/etc..

But then again, I'm no linguist, so who am I to argue :-P


T

--
INTEL = Only half of "intelligence".