Re: NATLANG: Chinese parts of speech (or lack thereof)

--- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:

>
> Chinese has a firm, not to say rigid, distinction
> between nouns and
> verbs.  Without that distinction, it would be
> ridiculously hard to
> parse Chinese sentences, especially serial-verb
> constructions like
> N1 V1 N2 V2 N3, which mean things like "N1 V1 N2,
> which V2 N3".
> Morphologically (yes, Chinese has morphology), nouns
> get noun suffixes,
> some of which are meaningful and some aren't; verbs
> get verb clitics.
>
Interesting. Would there be any simple example at hand
?

The first argument you give refers to word order. I
may be mistaken, but I understand it somehow like: "if
you use word W in place P, that you have to understand
it like a noun, and if you use the same W in place P',
than it should be understood like a verb. Which would
be very close to what I meant.

I'm not too sure about the secund. Are these
"suffixes" or "clitics" separate words added to the
nouns / verbs ? Or are they included ? How is it
exactly realized, both in oral and written form ?


=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


		
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