"Integrating" chengyu - 众说纷纭

[benotnobody]

Hi all,

Just generally speaking, I'm terribly confused as to how one is meant to "integrate" chengyu into a sentence. For instance, it seems like some can be used as 地-style adverbs, some can be used as adjectives, others cannot, etc etc. Any guidance?

More specifically, I'm wondering how I might use one specific chengyu in preparation for the essay portion of a written exam. I want to say, roughly:

"People's opinions are divided"

using the chengyu 众说纷纭

Would the appropriate sentence be:

人们的评价众说纷纭

人们的评价是众说纷纭的

人们众说纷纭

... or something else?

Thanks in advance.

[Kenny同志]

众说纷纭 suffices. If you refer to a particular thing, say, the birth place of a poet, you can say:

至于他的出生地是哪里，众说纷纭。

众说纷纭: opinions differ ( on a certain issue）

Edited November 17, 2009 at 01:13 PM by kenny2006woo

[anonymoose]

In situations such as this, one good strategy is to search on Google and see how it has been used by other people. If you get too many pages specifically about the chengyu rather than just examples of it in use, you can add some other random word to your search, and then the chengyu will not form the main subject of the results, but just be found somewhere in the text on the page.

[chrix]

There's some broad tendencies about how chengyu can be used, but it really depends on their meaning (if it refers to some kind of quality it can be used as a modifier, or adverbial for instance). The best thing is to do get a good chengyu dictionary with lots of example sentences and that also provides with some grammatical info.

In this particular case, the internal structure of the chengyu also influences its usage: first, it is has a clause-like structure to beginn with: 眾說-紛紜, so chances are it can be used as a predicate on its own. The presence of 眾 also means that you don't need to mention a generic subject such as "people".

(A somewhat similar example would be that it would be awkward to say "向他對牛彈琴" because the internally, the chengyu already has an object in the form of 牛.)