这‘之’的意思

[imron]

Unlike science, language is flexible and sometimes poorly defined.  If you keep wanting language to be well defined like science then you're only setting yourself up for disappointment because it's not going to change.

 

, when a word is a verb or a noun often depends on  how you wish to interpret it.

Not really, it's usually completely obvious from context.  If you try to interpret it differently it would be wrong.  Only when you take things out of context and try to study them in isolation does it become a problem.  Thankfully, that's not really an issue with language because we rarely use words in isolation.

[MPhillips]

Hey Pedroski! Write a brand-new Chinese grammar--I'm not kidding, it seems like you just might have the sitzfleisch to do it! Wish I had half of your youthful enthusiasm!

[陳德聰]

When someone asks about grammar, I assume they expect to get an aswer about grammar.

 

You not being able to figure out how pronouns work is not the fault of anyone here. But you then saying that there is no way to figure out how those pronouns work is just silly. If you don't agree with Western linguistics, that's fine, but the sentence you provided fits very nicely into a Western linguistics syntax tree, regardless of what you call the branching nodes.

I put a (?) beside "Clause" in "Attributive Clause(?)" because the attributive in this case is an entire sentence: 年轻人无法与之相比 and I am used to labelling that type of phrase as "IP" for "inflectional phrase" in English but Chinese doesn't inflect. Is clause a word you need a definition for? Really?

As for your weird assertion that Chinese doesn't distinguish subject predicate... You may even be correct (though I have a visceral disagreeance in my stomach), but please, show me a sentence where the 之 refers to the agent of the non-reflexive action being carried out.

Edit:

但是A有着B与之相比的C

I didn't really respond to why this is the wrong way to look at sentences. A, B, and C are all nouns, but it's not true that pronouns can refer to any noun in a sentence. This sentence has a clause embedded within an attributive (the phrase ending in 的).

So it should look like 但是A有着(B无法与之相比的)C. It doesn't take a grammarian to separate the attributive out and notice that it is its own sentence. Either way, 之 is never going to refer to your B, and if you're truly interested in why it won't refer to your C either, you're going to have to study syntax.

Double Edit:
For the record, a lot of Western "grammar" is garbage. Not to be confused with the actual study of syntax, where all of the words you seem to have issues with are pretty well defined. Word classes and their limited ability to encompass everything is also addressed by that study. But we're using English to explain grammar here, and the word in English to refer to "all the stuff that comes after the subject" is "predicate". Sorry not sorry.

[Pedroski]

Back there somewhere I asked ‘How do you know what '之’ relates to? Somehow no one answered that. It is one thing to 'know' it relates to '老年人‘， but by which logic do you arrive at that conclusion?

 

I see you do not like your comfortable notions queried. That is an unfortunate but normal reaction. Of course the sun goes around the earth, and the earth is flat. Everyone can see that! To say anything else would be crazy!

 

Pronouns are badly named, but it's the name we have. The most basic pronouns are in fact not pronouns, and more often than not, they do not 替代一个名字.

 

Simply use the 'noun' or relevant phrase instead of the 'pronoun'. See what you get! An experiment!

 

优势

[老年人的]优势 [descriptor] This is also the comparee. This is '之‘. The comparison is not 老黏人 / 年轻人 but rather 老年人有着的优势 / 年轻人有着的优势

 

[老年人有着的]优势

 

[老年人有着年轻人无法相比的]优势 The old folks don't 'have' the younguns, so although this works in Chinese syntax, you'd need 'Old people have a superiority, which ... in English. 'which' is of course a pronoun,  here representing 'a superioriy'

 

 

老年人有着年轻人无法与（老年人的优势）相比的优势。

 

 

老年人有着年轻人无法与（老年人有着的优势）相比的优势。

 

老年人有着年轻人无法与优势相比的优势。Don't like this one.

[Altair]

Pedroski, FYI, I think that the moderators have requested in the past that posts in this forum should generally be made in English.  It would seem natural to practice your Chinese here, but the decision seems to have been to give preference to allowing all levels of learners to have a chance to benefit from the discussion and not just those comfortable with reading Chinese in characters.  If you want to practice writing Chinese,I think you are supposed to post in the Chinese Corner Forum.

 

Also,

 

Context. Taking that clause alone, 年輕人 would not compare to themselves. Plus 之 isn't even necessary here.

我看不到你提的背景。

 

Can 背景 be used to mean 上下文?  I think 背景 means "context" only in a metaphorical sense, such as 历史背景 = "historical context."  As an aside, is there any problem using a term like 上下文 to apply to a spoken context where no actual 文/text is involved?

 

I agree with most of the advice and the explanations you have been given, but as a hyper-technical matter, I think I agree more with what ZhangJiang posted in post #14.

 

 

[老年人的]优势 [descriptor] This is also the comparee. This is '之‘. The comparison is not 老黏人 / 年轻人 but rather 老年人有着的优势 / 年轻人有着的优势

 

[老年人有着的]优势

 

[老年人有着年轻人无法相比的]优势 The old folks don't 'have' the younguns, so although this works in Chinese syntax, you'd need 'Old people have a superiority, which ... in English. 'which' is of course a pronoun,  here representing 'a superioriy'

 

At one level, I agee with you, but I think you do not account for "loose reference," which is common in both English and Chinese.

 

In English, although you must say "your speech is better than mine," you can also say: "You speak better than I/me" or "You speak better than I do."  Chinese has more or less the exact same three variants.  In the first and third variants, the things compared are the two manners of speaking.  In the second variant, the things compared are the speakers, even though this may not be strictly logical.

 

 

I'm not a fan of phrasal grammar. None of the terms you use have solid definitions. I have a paper somewhere from 梅祖麟 from 1961 in which he said subject predicate distinction paralleled the particular universal distinction in logic. He said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as "Chinese does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate"

 

At a technical level, I agree with the assessment that talking about subjects and predicates is not appropriate to Chinese.  As a practical matter, teaching grammars freely use this type of language for pedagogical purposes and I have no objection to it or the usage  陳德聰 made of it.  All the languages I have studied tend to be associated with grammar books that use terms in idiosyncratic ways that do not conform with strict linguistic usage.  The perfect tenses of English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic all mean slightly different things.

 

As a technical matter, my belief is that Chinese, compared with English, has more syntax incorporated into its lexis.  I think that the verb 相比 does not necessarily require an agent (i.e., someone or something that compares), but does require two patients (i.e., people or things to be compared). The phrase 于 X  相比, Y... is a common way to begin a sentence and means: "compared with X, Y...."  Neither the Chinese, nor the English specifies an agent doing the comparison in this case.

 

 

但是老年人有着年轻人无法与之相比的优势

 

In the above usage under discussion, a listener may or may not conclude that 年轻人 is a subject or topic, but he or she must look for the two parallel patients that 相比 lexically requires.

 

There are two pairs of choices: (1)老年人 and 年轻人 or (2) 老年人的优势 and 年轻人的优势.

 

The two corresponding English sentences are (A) "But the elderly have an advantage with respect to which the youth have no way of being compared (with them)" or (B) "But the elderly have an advantage that the youth cannot compare theirs to."  Whether or not 年轻人 is a topic, I think that the default in Chinese will be to assign this word to the status of one of the two patients, leaving both 无法 and 相比 without a clearly expressed agent.  Thus, the two things being compared will be 老年人 and 年轻人.  The word 优势 is not a subject, object, or topic of the verb 相比 since it is not lexically related to it.

 

Using 老年人的优势 and 年轻人的优势 as the two patients, or two things being compared, would also have the odd result of asserting that the youth have some advantage to be compared.  The Chinese sentence does not assert that the youth have any advantage, only that the elderly have one.

 

I think your difficulty is that you see the underlying sentence as something like: "The elderly have an advantage that is incomparable to what the youth have."  This English compares the objects of the two clauses.  However, the equivalent Chinese sentence has a different structure, which is simply [于 X  相比, Y...] with one of the patients is pre-posed as an expressed topic.  In most Chinese statements of comparison, you can compare only topics, not objects of verbs that are not topics.  That means the word 优势 cannot be one of the two things compared.  Also, in none of the Chinese or English sentences is a specific agent (or person or thing doing the comparison) mentioned.  It is also theoretically possible that the word 年轻人 is being compared with the phrase 老年人的优势, but I think this violates the lexical content of 相比, which calls for comparison of like things.

 

According to my proposed logic, if one of the things to be compared is 年轻人, then 之, the other thing to be compared, must necessarily refer to 老年人.

[Altair]

 

The former: "it".

Actually 与之相比 feels like a collocation, almost 成语-like. In ctext.org, I currently see a citation for this phrase from the Song dynasty, from a gloss of Mencius IV.3 by 趙岐.

 

你不认为‘之’ 等于代词’it‘吗？

 

对不起，读者你给我的链接，看不到你写的‘the former'. 太笨的。

I do not fully understand the above Chinese reply; but if the concern is the link being wrong, you can find the phrase 与之相比 at the following link that comes from the same text.  I understand this linked text even less, but maybe someone else can make some use of it.

 

Mencius gloss

[Pedroski]

Well thanks for that all.

I would like to ask you to read the following sentences and tell me which ones you approve of, which ones you do not approve of, and why, because I am fascinated by this little ‘的’。

 

 

1 你有的苹果比我有的苹果更多。

2 你的苹果比我的苹果更多。

3 你有苹果比我有苹果更多。

 

 

4 但是老年人有的优势，那就是他们积累的经验。

5 但是老年人有优势，那就是他们积累的经验。

 

 

ps I would translate "

但是老年人有着年轻人无法与之相比的优势，那就是他们积累的经验。= However, old people's incomparable advantage over young people is their experience.

 

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, naturally you guys don't have my text. It has the title 老年人再就业。 You are dead right, you can't compare unlike things. In the text, what they are actually talking about is (my words) 老年人的技能比年轻人的技能更好。If you compare old folks and young folks, well, all you can say is, the young ones are younger, (and maybe have more sexual prowess).

[陳德聰]

2 & 5, but I would say 你的苹果比我的多. No need to repeat 苹果 and I would remove 更 since it's redundant unless you want to really emphasize it. If you 有 something, it is already you 的.

Your translation omits 积累 but otherwise the English seems like an idiomatic representation of the same idea. Except the word "incomparable" here seems odd since advantage is itself a comparison isn't it? Here, young people don't have an advantage because they can't compare to old people in this regard.

I went back and re-read the thread again, could it be that your difficulty here stems from not understanding the work that 的 does?

Edit: I misread your request.

 

1 你有的苹果比我有的苹果更多。 This one seems grammatically okay but is wordy and sounds unnaturally so. I feel like I could get a reading of 有的 = "some" out of this which clearly doesn't make sense.

 

2 你的苹果比我的苹果更多。As above, I would strike out the second time 苹果 shows up.

 

3 你有苹果比我有苹果更多。You can't 比 sentences like that.

 

4 但是老年人有的优势，那就是他们积累的经验。This 的 is more evidently wrong to me than the one in #1. Here it seems like you need to say 有 or 的 to express possession rather than trying to use both. You could say 但是老年人的优势就是他们积累的经验。
 

5 但是老年人有优势，那就是他们积累的经验。Fine.

[Altair]

Let me add to what 陳德聰 posted.

 

 

1 你有的苹果比我有的苹果更多。 This one seems grammatically okay but is wordy and sounds unnaturally so.

I agree.

 

 

2 你的苹果比我的苹果更多。As above, I would strike out the second time 苹果 shows up.

I agree; however, from a strictly grammatical viewpoint, I am perhaps more bothered by the use of 更, than by the unnecessary repetition of 苹果.

 

 

3 你有苹果比我有苹果更多。You can't 比 sentences like that.

I agree.  The sentence would be possible only if you could say *你有苹果很多, which is not grammatical, or at least not meaningful.  Close English translations are also somewhat dubious: *"You have apples a lot" or *"You have apples more than I do".

 

 

4 但是老年人有的优势，那就是他们积累的经验。This 的 is more evidently wrong to me than the one in #1. Here it seems like you need to say 有 or 的 to express possession rather than trying to use both.

I wondered about using 有and 的 together, but cannot say whether this is okay or not and will defer to 陳德聰's knowledge.  It certainly seems unnecessarily complicated, even if it might turn out to be technically grammatical.

 

Using either 但是老年人的优势 or 但是老年人有优势 to set up a topic is quite possible; however, I think perhaps that using 那 to introduce the comment requires that the associated topic be a clause representing a condition.  If my speculation is correct, I think you need to either drop 那 from the sentence (as 陳德聰 did) or use the clause 老年人有优势 as the topic, as you proposed in sentence number 5.

 

 

5 但是老年人有优势，那就是他们积累的经验。Fine.

I agree, for the reasons I state above.

[Pedroski]

Thanks for that. Yeah, tricky little fellow ‘的’. I know there is a reading of '有的‘ which corresponds almost exactly with Spanish 'hay'. However, 百度 has many many examples of '你有的’， ‘我有的’ where these are actually equivalent to '你的‘， ’我的‘. I will start collecting such sentences as I read. I already have big collection of sentences with '把’，'去+verb = to infinitive' and other interesting features of Chinese. What I like about '的‘ is the way it subordinates all things and makes them descriptors, adjectives if you like. I've seen sentences, with long long explanations piled up beore a noun, slip a '的’ in there, and everything is an adjective. In English you have to use a relative clause to do this.

 

Thanks for your trouble, I appreciate it!

 

Here a neat little example, from my text, of what I am talking about: ，在---他自己都没意识到的---情况下

 

In Chinese you can say "He is a ----live in a big house, eat caviar all day, drive a rolls-royce的 ---- person. In English you have to say 'He is a person who ...