Re: Mandarin Relative Clauses?

From: "H. S. Teoh"

> > I have a car which I painted and which I crashed.
> Hmm, I'm having a hard time with this one. I don't know if it's even
> possible to express this in Mandarin without circumlocutions
> (rearranging/rephrasing the sentence). OK, here's one possible way to do
> it:
>         Wo2 you3 i1 liang3 che1 shi4 wo1 you2 chi4 ken1 tzhuang4 huai4 de.
>         "I have a car which is [the one] I painted and crashed."
>         (Sorry, I dunno what's the right transliteration for tzhuang4 --
>         it's [tswaN].)
It is a hard one to translate, but for me, the difficulty is in having "I"
in the relative clause. To my ear, it's okay to say:

Wo3 you3 yi1 liang4 you2qi1 er2 bei4 zhuang4huai4 de che.
I have a which was painted and crashed car.

Too many wo3's spoil the broth.

The original above sentence may also be a little unfair to foist on Chinese,
because topicalization (more difficult in English) allows for different
sentence structures. How 'bout:

Wo3 you3 de che1, wo3 you2qi1 er2 zhuang4huai4 le.
The car (which) I have, I painted and crashed (it).

which makes for clunky English. Since you can juxtapose thoughts with a
topic-comment sentence in Chinese, you don't necessarily need a relative
clause.

> > If you can conjoin adjectives in the same way as relative clauses, then
you
> > learn nothing. But if they behave differently (eg one can conjoin the
other
> > can't) then it is unlikely that they are the same type of structure.
Now,
> > if they do behave the same, try conjoining an adjective with a relative
> > clause. This cannot be simulated in English, but something like:
> >
> > I have a red and which I crashed car.
>
> Hmm. My "gut feeling" tells me to treat the two modifiers differently:
>
>         Wo2 you3 i1 liang3 hong2 che2 shi4 wo2 tzhuang4 huai4 de.
>         "I have a red car which is [the one] I crashed."
How 'bout this:

Wo3 you3 yi1 liang4 hong2se4 de, bei4 wo3 zhuang4huai4 de che.
I have a which is red, which I crashed car.

Although Marcus correctly states the original sentence:

> > I have a red and which I crashed car.
cannot be simulated in English, it still feels weird to translate it into
Chinese that way, I think, because of pragmatic and not grammatical
considerations. Grammatically, I can say in English:

Horses eat hay and mine lives in Essex.

but pragmatically it's a little confusing placing these two pieces of
information together in this way. That's the way Marcus' above sentence
feels to me. But if we render it as:

I have a red car which I crashed.

I suspect you might be more inclined to use the "hong2se4 de, bei4 wo3
zhuang4huai4 de" structure, which places "red" and "I crashed" on equal
footing.

> > If you can conjoin them, they are almost certainly the same structural
> > thing, but if you cannot, then they probably are not the same thing.
> Hmm, it seems, after I think about it, that there are actually *three*
> different constructions we're talking about here:
> 1)      adjective without "de", eg. "hong2 che1" (red car)
>         Very tight binding, can easily pick up idiomatic meanings.
> 2)      adjective with "de", eg. "hong2 de che1" (car which is red)
>         Not so tightly binding, doesn't have idiomatic meanings, and
>         usually describes a particular instance of "car" which is "red"
>         (rather than a general category).
> 3)      relative clause, eg. "che1 shi4 wo2 chuang4 huai4 de" (car [which]
>         is the one I crashed)
>         Very loose binding, almost behaving like an adjoined sentence.
But doesn't (3) also allow for "wo3 zhuang4huai4 de che1" (the car I
crashed)?

> But the monkey wrench in all of this is that, depending on context, (2)
> and (3) may be interchangeably used to express the same idea. So perhaps
> it's more of a grammatical differentiation than anything else... For
> example, if I said:
>         Wo2 you3 i1 liang3 che1 shi4 peng2you3 kei3 de
>         (I have a car which a friend gave [to me])
I think what you're calling "adjoined sentences" goes back to what I'm
calling "topicalization".

> Then, in a later sentence, I may refer to the car thus:
>         Na4 liang3 peng2you3 kei3 de che1 pei4 chuang4 huai4 le.
>         (That friend-given car has crashed)
My personal preference for this kind of sentence is to say:

Peng2you3 gei3 de na4liang4 che1 bei4 zhuang4huai4 le.

but that's much of a muchness.

> The other monkey wrench is that in spoken Mandarin, sometimes you would
> drop out the "de" in cases like "peng2you3 de che1". It's not considered
> to be "technically correct"; but it's habitually done anyway. Eg. "wo2 de
> peng2you3 de che1" can also be spoken as "wo3 peng2you3 de che1" for
> short, or even "wo3 peng2you3 che1".
This _is_ correct. Words describing relationships between people most often
drop "de".

Wo3 ma1  my mother
ni3 tong2shi4  your colleague
ta1men lao3ban3 their boss
ta1 nan2peng2you3 her boyfriend

wo3 peng2you3 che1 is permissable, I guess, but sounds a *little* funky to
me (I'd throw in a "de"), whereas:

wo3 peng2you3 jia1   does not. Go figure (inalienable possession issues?).

> CAVEAT: my dialect of Mandarin may not be 100% the same as the one they
> use in mainland China. So don't take this as gospel truth :-)
For my non-native money, your analysis thus far has been right on.

Kou