Grammar for 你叫什么名字？

[argrr101]

I know that you can drop the 名字 if you are being informal, but I was wondering if there was some grammatical explanation for why you need the 名字?

 

How is this different (if at all) from 你姓什么？And why does that sentence not need anything after the 什么?

[weiwuji]

it's more of formality, rather than grammatical reasons. in an informal conversation, you could even start a question saying, "你是？"

[陳德聰]

叫 means "to call" and in this case "to be called".

你叫什麼名字 means "what name are you called by?"

姓 means "to be surnamed".

你姓什麼 is fine without anything afterward because you wouldn't need to say "by what surname are you surnamed?"

It's not a grammatical issue it's just a lexical issue.

[argrr101]

Okay so since 叫 is "to be called" and not "to be named" you would need to clarify that you are looking for the name that you are called, whereas for 姓 it is only ever referring to one thing so it does not need to be clarified.

 

Does that sound correct?

[陳德聰]

Sounds about right.

[Guest123]

By the way, 你叫什么? can mean "Why are you shouting?" 

[Yorin]

 

How is this different (if at all) from 你姓什么？And why does that sentence not need anything after the 什么?

 

As 姓 means both "to be surnamed ..." (verb) and "family name" (noun), the complete sentence would be 你姓什么姓?

While technically correct, I think you can see why this would be perceived as a very redundant and thus unusual thing to say,

while "你叫什么名字?" lacks that degree of awkwardness.

[hanola]

I'd have a question about word-order connected to this subject. Is both:

 

1) 你名字叫什么? and

 

2) 你叫什么名字? correct?. 

 

Is maybe 1 better?

 

Cause I read that the noun after the verb would rather be used for things such as in: 这叫什么名字? what is this (thing) called?

[yifeng]

"的" should be inserted into sentence 1: 你的名字叫什么？ This sounds more nature.

 

你的名字叫什么？ and 你叫什么名字？ are correct equally and can be used alternately.

[Messidor]

if you really want to know the syntactic explanation...

 

什么 is a type of interrogative pronoun that can be used both adjectively and nominally ---- nominal in 你叫什么 and adjective in 你叫什么名字.

The "part of speech" of 什么 is determined by the existence (or not) of 名字, but not the other way round.

Pragmatically, the longer the sentence the more formality it may represent.