Re: verbs = nouns?

On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 08:02:18AM -0800, Marcus Smith wrote:
> H.S. Teoh wrote:
[snip]
> >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.
>
> That's just a bias based to English grammar. "Verbs" and "adjectives" both
> serve as predicates, so it is not surprising to find languages that do not
> distinguish between the two. Many languages do not draw such distinction.
> The question is: why should we assume there is an implicit copula if one
> never shows up in the language (with adjectives, I mean, not nouns)
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.

OK, I digress again, but implicit copulas are the closest thing I can find
to explain that sentence in English. That's the problem with going by "gut
feeling", I suppose, having not studied formal Chinese grammar, but just
"knowing" it. Now that I think about it again, I don't really have a good
explanation for it.

[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..
>
> I find this a curious comment, given your above statement about implicit
> copulas. Isn't an implicit copula just imposing "IE-based linguistic
> analyses" on Chinese? By grouping adjectives as stative verbs, we are
> actually moving away from an IE-based treatment.
[snip]

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?

The only possibilities I can think of are like fa1chan3 (to develop) that
was mentioned before, but I think of this as a verb, and the other usages
of it (adjective/noun) are simply the gerund and participial forms of it
(with the null inflection morpheme(?) on each form). Or, pai2 (to
arrange): in a verbal context, it's to arrange; in a nominal context, it
means a row, or a group (an pre-arranged group). But I can't think of any
context where pai2 could be an adjective.

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. 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. (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?)

But then again, I do realize that English *is* my most fluent language, in
spite of it being L2, so perhaps I myself am unconsciously coercing
Chinese grammar into an IE-based treatment. :-P


T

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