Are “Subject+Verb…ma?” and “Subject+Verb bù Verb…?” questions fully interchangeable?

[Sibutlasi]

imron: "@Sibutlasi, are there any linguistic theories related to the importance of paragraphs?"

Yes, imron. Ignoring the contributions of traditional rhetoric, A LOT of work has been done in [Pike's] 'Tagmemics' since the late 50's, various so-called 'Text Grammars' starting in the early 70's, [Halliday's] 'Functional Grammar' (late 60's>), 'Discourse Analysis' (70's >), [Kamp & Reyle's] 'Discourse Representation Theory' (80's>), 'linguistic pragmatics', 'linguistic stylistics'...... and more recently [Hengeveld and Lachlan Mackenzie's] current Functional Discourse Grammar (2008 >),.... (I surely forget many others). Some of those labels represent whole fields rather than theories (e.g., discourse analysis, pragmatics,...), most represent 'meta-theories', not really self-contained, coherent theories (in the sense of formal deductive systems), and not all denominations refer to currently active groups (e.g., I have not seen tagmemic work in any major journals for nearly thirty years, which does NOT mean that earlier tagmemic contributions can be forgotten!), but, anyway, just a few clicks in Google will lead you to as much information as you may wish.

[roddy]

I suspect Imron may have been hinting that such theories could perhaps be applied in cases such as this.

[陳德聰]

@renzhe

Potentially missing the point, which is to determine in what syntactically, phonologically, semantically, etc. conditioned cases they do not "mean" the exact same thing, if they exist, and do so in a way that is derived from empirical evidence. Kind of how linguistics works.

[renzhe]

So what is your opinion? In what syntactically, phonologically, semantically etc. conditioned cases exactly do they mean different things?

I mean, I like buzzwords as much as anyone, but I don't feel like we've moved closer to answering the original question after the first few replies.

[Guest realmayo]

I suppose the question is whether 陳德聰 & the OP are looking for an answer involving the Chinese language or one involving linguistics.

Out of interest, what about replies? Do they differ? i.e.:

Shang bu shang ke?

Shang.

/Bu shang.

Shang ke ma?

Shang.

/Bu shang.

To me identical replies seem natural but I certainly haven't got a perfect ear -- what do other people think?

[Sibutlasi]

Thank you all. I'm sorry, it was not my intention to raise here such daunting topics as the nature of meaning, synonymy, equivalence, ontology, etc. That would require getting very, very technical, and properly justifying complex philosophical and theoretical choices. As soon as we started that sort of discussion, I'm afraid each of us would try to take too much for granted, misunderstandings would multiply exponentially, and the result would be utter confusion rather than enlightenment.

Take renzhe's (#12)'ontological meaning'. Which 'ontological meaning' are we talking about? A realist's? A Fregean/Platonic idealist's? An empiricist's? A behaviourist's? A conceptualist/cognitivist's? A nominalist's? A Wittgensteinian pragmatist's? A Quinean nihilist's? A Saussurean/Hjelmslevian/Coseriuan's linguist's? A Chomskian immanentist's?, What various languages allow their speakers to put names to? This does not exhaust the possibilities. 'Ontological meaning' is a useless category unless one specifies much much more.

The same goes for 'equivalence'. I agree with renzhe (#18) that, in the limit, it is trivially possible to define 'equivalence' in such a way that nothing is equivalent to anything else. Unfortunately, when renzhe writes (in #20) "I maintain that "...ma" and "v+bu+v" said in exactly the same way in exactly the same situation between exactly the same people (of equal standing) mean exactly the same thing." he unwittingly begs the question: That kind of 'equivalence' is self-defeating (and so useless for testing purposes), because there is NO way to satisfy the first three "sames" in it.The problem is as old as Adam in philosophy; if somebody is really interested, W. van Orman Quine's "Two dogmas of empiricism" (1951)and Strawson's "Individuals" (1959)are two classics still worth reading.

But, of course, that is NOT the concept of equivalence I used and exemplified in (#7) and (#11). Obviously, intonation, emphasis/stress, focus, etc., and 'context' (another heavily loaded term) may turn 'the same' sentence (TYPE) into 'different' (= contextually non-interchangeable)utterances,but that is irrelevant here; I would never have asked a question about that.

All I wanted in (#1) was to make sure that those two types of Chinese yes/no questions were not co-textually conditioned variants (rather than free variants, as my grammars led me to believe). I never intended to raise the big problem of context and equivalence 'tout court'. Yet, I must apologize, because in (#1) I myself stupidly caused the misunderstanding that has led to the somewhat messy exchanges in (#12, 16, 17, 18, 19, and #20). My mistake was NOT distinguishing between "CON-text" and "CO-text" (= previous linguistic context), the restricted sense of 'context' that was relevant to the question. You see? You fail to be precise on a little innocent concept and what results is a mess.

In the restricted sense of 'equivalence' I did mean, I'm sorry, anonymoose (#15)and renzhe (#12), but I must maintain what I said about the double object and the 'to-object' constructions of English in (#7)and on the German past/perfect difference in (#11).

For my initial purposes, the crucial contribution of renzhe's (#12)is that "or not" is the WRONG translation for the 'bù-V' part of the 'V-bù-V' construction. Let me quote myself in (#7): "In fact, I cannot yet be sure whether the correspondence "verb bù verb" <> "verb..... or NOT" (an elliptical version of the sentence!)is accurate. If it is not, all my reasoning above collapses". So,if renzhe's remarks in (#2)and(#12)can be reconciled, my original question is more or less answered.

Of course other relevant details have emerged, as acknowledged in this and earlier posts. A new one is the pair "Nǐ bù shì lǎoshī ma?" / "*Nǐ bù shì bù shì lǎoshī?" cited in 陳德聰's (14). The former raises another important issue as regards the nature and interactions between polarity and illocutionary force(as its counterpart does in English), but I'd better ignore that here, :-). The latter's unacceptability, however, follows from the nature of 'bù', I think: If 'bù' is a propositional function (True>False, or viceversa), as "not" is in English, it must apply to a proposition, and a proposition MUST include a polarity choice, positive or negative; 'shì bu shì laoshi', of course, by definition, does NOT contain a polarity choice. No wonder, then, that example 2) (in #4) is bad. As to your question,陳德聰, the answer is 'No'. I do not know enough about Chinese to be able to design relevant intralinguistic texts of my own yet.

[Guest realmayo]

"...ma" and "v+bu+v" said in exactly the same way in exactly the same situation between exactly the same people (of equal standing) mean exactly the same thing." he unwittingly begs the question: That kind of 'equivalence' is self-defeating (and so useless for testing purposes), because there is NO way to satisfy the first three "sames" in it.

Surely it's easily satisfied, pretty much every time a Chinese person asks a question: he makes a choice between which if the two patterns he uses. And if he is asked to consider whether using the alternative would have made any difference to what was communicated to the listener, and if he says he thinks not, then you have the answer to your question. No need for ontological arguments here!

However, I suspect there are some times where the two choices produce different results. But if so, they must be very nuanced.

Anyway yeah, V bu V does not equal the "...or not?" in English. They're totally separate languages.

[renzhe]

Take renzhe's (#12)'ontological meaning'. Which 'ontological meaning' are we talking about? A realist's? A Fregean/Platonic idealist's? An empiricist's? A behaviourist's? A conceptualist/cognitivist's? A nominalist's? A Wittgensteinian pragmatist's? A Quinean nihilist's? A Saussurean/Hjelmslevian/Coseriuan's linguist's? A Chomskian immanentist's?, What various languages allow their speakers to put names to? This does not exhaust the possibilities. 'Ontological meaning' is a useless category unless one specifies much much more.

The same goes for 'equivalence'. I agree with renzhe (#18) that, in the limit, it is trivially possible to define 'equivalence' in such a way that nothing is equivalent to anything else. Unfortunately, when renzhe writes (in #20) "I maintain that "...ma" and "v+bu+v" said in exactly the same way in exactly the same situation between exactly the same people (of equal standing) mean exactly the same thing." he unwittingly begs the question: That kind of 'equivalence' is self-defeating (and so useless for testing purposes), because there is NO way to satisfy the first three "sames" in it.The problem is as old as Adam in philosophy; if somebody is really interested, W. van Orman Quine's "Two dogmas of empiricism" (1951)and Strawson's "Individuals" (1959)are two classics still worth reading.

Oh, I see what's happening here. Well played, sir.

Enjoy your time here