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A Grammatical Contrast and its Signals in Mandarin Chinese and in English(1)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
Extract
Let us consider two lists of Chinese words in Mandarin Chinese, the spoken National language. (In this article the writer is also the informant). According to their syntactic functions, we shall call the words in one of these lists “nouns”, and those in the other list “verbs”.
Examples of nouns are: gou ‘dogs’; ji ‘chickens’; wudz ‘rooms’; tsai ‘vegetables, dishes (of food)’ Examples of verbs are: jiau ‘bark, call’; chr ‘eat’; hei ‘dark, are dark’; tian ‘sweet, are sweet’. In Chinese, there are sentences consisting of a noun followed by a verb. We shall call the formula for such sentences S = N V. Examples are: gou jiau ‘Dogs bark.’; ji chr ‘Chickens eat.’; wudz hei ‘Rooms are dark.’; tsai tian ‘Vegetable are sweet; dishes (of food) are sweet.’. There are also parts of sentences in Chinese consisting of a verb followed by a noun. We shall call the formula for such “verb noun” sentence parts V N. Examples are: jiau gou ‘call dogs’; chr ji ‘eat chickens; hei wudz ‘darkrooms’; tian tsai ‘desserts’.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 1960 , pp. 7 - 13
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1960
Footnotes
1
Part of this article was presented as a paper delivered at the 11th University of Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, 1958. I am grateful to the constructive suggestions of Fang Kuei Li, W. F. Twaddell, J. W. Wevers and R. H. Robinson.
References
2 “A noun is a syntactic word which can be placed in apposition with a D-AN compound, as ren in jeyg ren ‘this man,’ shoei in i-aei shoei ‘a cup of water,’ yan in leang-jin yan (or yan leang-jin in bookkeeping style) ‘two catties of salt.’” Chao, Y. R., Mandarin Primer (Mass. Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 46.Google Scholar
3 “A verb is a syntactic word which can be modified by the adverb bu (except that the verb yeou takes mei) and can be followed by the phrase suffix le.” Ibid., p. 47.
4 In Chinese, gou3 is both ‘dog’ and ‘dogs’. The English plural form is used to translate gou3.
5 Chao, Y. R. and Yang, L. S., A Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (Mass. Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 185.Google Scholar
6 In Chinese, hei1 is ‘am dark’, ‘is dark’, and ‘are dark’. The English plural form is used to translate hei1.
7 In Chinese, jiau4 is ‘bark’ and ‘barks’. The English non-third person singular is used to translate jiau4.
8 This is Fang Kuei Li’s example of ambiguity in Chinese. It means “chickens eat” as well as “chickens to be eaten”. Only the first meaning is used here.
9 The first two examples of V N are imperatives. These V N also may precede a verb, follow a noun or a verb, or both. The last two examples of “V N are not imperatives. These V N may precede a verb or follow a verb or both.
10 jiau4 de gou3 means ‘dogs that bark’ as well as ‘dogs that are called’ and chr1 de ji1 means ‘chickens that eat’ as well as ‘chickens that are eaten’. Only the first meaning in each instance is used here.
11 As in li3tou hei1 de wu1dz ‘rooms that are dark inside’. li3tou hei1 de wu1dz is not an expansion of li3tou heil wu1dz. Li3 tou hei1 wu1dz is not a construction.
12 As in kou3 wei4 tian2 de tsai4 ‘vegetables, dishes (of food) that are sweet’. kou3 wei4 tian2 de tsai4 is not an expansion of kou3 wei4 tian2 tsai4. Kou3 wei4 tian2 tsai4 is not a construction.
13 “Similar” = “compatible”, here and later in the paper, refers to meanings.
14 In the transcription the superscript numerals indicate the tone of the preceding syllable. The tones are, respectively, (1) high level, (2) high rising, (3) low and (4) high falling.