Re: verbs = nouns?

Douglas Koller wrote:

>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.
>
>> 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".>
FWIW, Kash handles this with derivations:
nele shisu 'red sky' - descriptive/adjectival
nele yashisu 'the sky is red' - stative/predicative
nele yayushisu 'the sky is getting/turning red' - yu- inchoative
luhuni yarucisu sunju 'his blood reddens/makes red the soil' - ruñ-
causative

Adjectives are verbs.  Formally comparable to e.g.
Erek mende yahorem 'Erek has died' (Present tense _erek yahorem_ would make
sense only as a stage direction; colloq. it might be 'he is dying' but that
should be better:
Erek yayukorem 'E. is dying/is moribund'
Erek yarungoremsa foritni 'E. extinguished his torch' - the preferred usage
of the causative of this verb, though in the context of describing a battle,
it could mean 'killed, wiped out'.





>> (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