Re: verbs = nouns?

H.S. Teoh wrote:

>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.
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)

> > 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...?
The semantic evidence I've seen suggests that this isn't actually what's
going on. But I don't have a better story to give you.

> > 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)?
I can't say, since I don't know what all the parts of the sentence are. I
do think that it is equally strange for a verb and a adjective to be
functioning adverbially. If an adjective can do it, then I see know reason
to exclude a verb.

> > 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..
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.

Marcus


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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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