Re: Mandarin Relative Clauses?

On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 08:14:54PM -0800, Marcus Smith wrote:
[snip]
> I don't have the notes anymore, but I attended a talk about 6 months ago
> that addressed this exact problem, and concluded that adjectives and
> relative clauses were distinct structures. I'm not sure of the evidence,
> but here is something you could try that should be revealing. Translate the
> following sentences:
>
> I have a red and white car.
Wo2 you3 i1 liang3 hong2 ken1 pai2 de che1

"I have a car which is red and white".

Hmm, interesting. It seems to be impossible to omit the "de" when you have
more than one modifier. But I still feel a different nuance between "hong2
che1" and "hong2 de che1". Like I said before, in the former, the modifier
"hong2" is very tightly bound to the noun. If there's such a thing as an
adjective incorporation on nouns, this would be it. It's almost like "Red
Car" as opposed to "red car". The latter, however, is merely a normal
modifier.

> 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].)

I think I see what you mean... the first sentence is more naturally
rendered with the modifying phrase preceding the noun, whereas the second
sentence is more natural with an auxilliary clause attached to the
sentence. Although it is conceivable to translate the first sentence using
this auxilliary construction, it would sound very odd and unnatural,
indeed.

> 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."

Although it is possible to move the "hong2" (red) to the subclause, it
would sound very strange.

> 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.
[snip]

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 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])

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)

However, there is a big distinction between this and the construction in
(1): "peng2you3 che1" means "friend-car" or "friendship-car" (if such a
thing existed), whereas "peng2you3 de che1" means "a friend's car".

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".

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 :-)


T

--
Let's eat some disquits while we format the biskettes.