他发现房梁上藏着一个小偷

[Yezze]

This sentence is from a book of mine, a series of idioms, this one belonging to "梁上君子“

他发现房梁上藏着一个小偷。

I was reading this, and the 着 threw me off。 I asked my exchange student (from China...), he told me not to worry about it and it was just there becuase it sounds good.... If I take it out, the sentence still makes sense to me

他- He

发现- discovered

房梁 - beam of the house

上 - on

藏 - hidden

一个小偷 - thief

Or... He discovered a thief hiding on the beam of the room. (This is without the 着）。

So, if you haven't figured out my question... what is the function of 着 in this sentence。 ( I hope I am not over thinking this and missing an obvious function this serves)

Thanks

[Glenn]

I thought it was just the zhe that expresses a continuous state when I first read it. Is that a strange reading of it?

[Hofmann]

he told me not to worry about it and it was just there becuase it sounds good

↑ Typical native speaker response.

It's a durative or continuous aspect particle, signaling durativity. It has three basic functions (Xiao, R. and McEnery T. (1999) Aspect in Mandarin Chinese: a corpus-based study. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Pub Co.).

• to occur with a verb or adjective to indicate the durativity of a continued dynamic or static situation, e.g. 我正在看著我自己發怒 "I am watching myself get angry."
  
• to serve with a verb as an adverbial modifier to express overlapping actions and provide background information, e.g. 他笑著說「腦殘。」 "Laughing, he said 'brain dead.'"
  
• to occur in locative inversion and indicate existential status e.g. 房梁上藏着一个小偷 "on the house beam is hidden a thief"
  

[tooironic]

Or the short answer: just think of it like "-ing" in English. No?

[roddy]

That's exactly what I was going to say.

[Baudelaire]

(I'm not a native and chinese is not my major, so it's mainly based on my empirical observation)

It's because 藏 is a "passive" action (the thief has already made the action of hide himself, so now he need to do nothing to continue to stay in this state) which is still continuing while an other action happened.

here's some more example using 着

我们看着这孩子玩耍。

We were watching the child at play.

我弟弟手里拿着一个摄像机。

My brother has a camera in the hand.

她在一棵树下坐着。

She was sitting under a tree.

[Yezze]

Wow... I was over thinking this way to much (sry about delayed response, was on a trip).

What I got was: So its basically like -ing/It shows that an action is continuing

Thanks for the examples Baudelaire and Hofmann.

我弟弟听着古典音乐。

My brother is listening to classical music.