学生<放>假了

[rtf]

各位好：

 

It`s obvious that in 学校放假了 'the school dismissed the students',学校 is the subject and 放假了 is the predicate,because 放 has a meaning 'dismiss','send',' release'.

 

But what about 学生放假了? I`ve been told that  放 means 'go' or 'have',the whole sentence

 

being interpreted as 'the students have gone on holiday',but I didn`t find anything even close

 

to 'go' or 'have' in the dictionaries.What would  the literal meaning of 放 be here,please?

 

 

 

 

多谢。

[anonymoose]

Not sure in this case, but there is something in Chinese called "notional passive" (I think it's explained in Yip and Rimmington if I remember correctly), where the subject of the sentence is actually a notional object. In other words, the noun stands in the grammatical position of a subject, but actually functions as the object of the verb, like a passive. It's notional, because it's not explicitly marked as a passive grammatically. For example, 饭吃完了. Obviously it wasn't the 饭 that was doing the 吃ing.

[somethingfunny]

I think anonymoose is right here, using his example:

 

饭吃完了 The food has been eaten completely

学校放假了 The school has gone on holiday

学生放假了 The students have gone on holiday

 

But also, you'll notice here that I haven't used the meaning 'dismiss', 'send', 'release' etc. of 假 when talking about the school.  My understanding is that the 学校 and the 学生 are both affected by the verb 放假 in the same way.  And that's because 放假 is a two-character verb in itself meaning 'to go on holiday'.

[rtf]

Thanks,guys.

 

 

 

I think anonymoose is right here, using his example:

 

饭吃完了 The food has been eaten completely

学校放假了 The school has gone on holiday

学生放假了 The students have gone on holiday

 

Yes,I guess that`s a good way to explain it.I wonder what natives think about it.But following the '饭吃完了 The food has been eaten completely' logic,which in reality is the passive voice,at least in English,we should be consistent and interpret 学校放假了 in the passive voice as well,which is 'the school has been dismissed for a holiday'.The same thing with 学生放假了,it should be 'the students have been dismissed for a holiday'.That explains it and I like it,but,again,let`s wait for a native`s opinion,to be sure.

[Guest realmayo]

There's a more developed discussion started by the OP on this site: http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/i-m-going-on-holidays-in-a-week.3079780/

[davoosh]

Not directly related to your question, but I think that natives' opinions on their own language's grammar is often not very helpful for foreign learners. Natives generally learn grammar in a prescriptive way (as taught in schools) which isn't very useful for learners who do need a more descriptive approach of actual usage. The way they perceive things may also be contradictory to actual usage and how a descriptive grammar would describe the point. Nowadays, I tend to only ask natives who already have a good understanding of linguistics in general (unless it's a simple 'does this sound right?' type of question).

[edelweis]

@realmayo: nice!!! 

 

在公共气车站，他排队上车了 => <在北海公园>下车

<看错>人 =>看见 - negation

 

One has to admire such persistence. Kind of reminds me of pedroski.

 

Ok, I admit it, I just spent half an hour trying to match pedroski's posts to L3P's...

[Guest realmayo]

Ok, I admit it, I just spent half an hour trying to match pedroski's posts to L3P's...

 

  tee-hee that was my first thought!

[anonymoose]

The other thing I would add is that it's not a good idea to always look for direct correspondences between Chinese and English. In your original example, I don't think trying to analyse 放假了 beyond just accepting that it, as a unit, means "broken up for holiday" is going to bear much fruit.

[anonymoose]

And another thing, I think maybe bringing the passive into this in my first post just muddied the water. Technically, 假 is the object of 放, so it doesn't really make sense to try to interpret either the school or the students as the object of 放假. All I really wanted to point out is that the relationship between the subject, object and verb (on a notional level) is not always clear cut, so as you showed, 学校 and 学生 can both be subjects for 放假, where in the former case, notionally, the students are dismissed (but again, that's not the same as the notional passive I mentioned, so maybe I should just shut up before I complicate things further).

[imron]

Ok, I admit it, I just spent half an hour trying to match pedroski's posts to L3P's...

The writing style is actually quite dissimilar, as are the level of questions being asked.  (For reference, their IP addresses are also completely different, and yes, admin does keep a close watch on things like multiple accounts).

[rtf]

Thanks,anonymoose. I`ve decided to accept the notional passive approach on the issue. It seems to explain the thing.

Again,thanks a lot to all who contributed.

[yifeng]

I agree with somethingfunny: 

And that's because 放假 is a two-character verb in itself meaning 'to go on holiday'.

 

 

I think in the two sentences of the first post 放假 indicates a state of the subject, i.e., "SUBJECT is on holiday/vacation."

 

As a word, 放假's meaning and usage is beyond what can be inferred directly from character A + character B. Let us look more of its usage:

 

1. no subject

 

中秋节放假吗？ Do we have a holiday on the Mid-Autumn Festival?

国庆放假三天  We have a three-day holiday for the National day. 

这个周末不放假  Holiday is canceled this weekend.

 

2. variants of 放假

 

学校正放暑假  The school is on summer vacation.

学生正在放寒假  Students are on winter vacation.

我们国庆节放七天假  We have a seven-day holiday for the National day.

 

Think of 放...假 as a fixed collocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation or phraseme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme.

 

 

Raising questions and answering questions are important ways in learning a foreign language, especially for adults, aren't they?

[somethingfunny]

Just to add to yifeng's second comment there: I just looked it up and I believe the correct term is 离合动词 or 'separable verb'.  These are fairly common in Chinese and it's important to be familiar with how they work.

 

开车 -> 开一辆车

看书 -> 看一本汉语书

学汉语 -> 学一年汉语

 

And then you get even weirder stuff, like: 开起车来 which apparently means to start (and continue) to do the verb.  I rarely come across this usage though.

[edelweis]

Raising questions and answering questions are important ways in learning a foreign language, especially for adults, aren't they?

@ifeng: true, but it's better if you can sort out which of several contradictory answers is correct. Kudos to you for redirecting the thread.

@Imron: I bow to your wisdom and admin superpowers.

@rtf: apologies for suggesting that you might be the forum member named pedroski.

In my defense, it's a little confusing that you (or someone asking questions similar to yours) claims to be male on Wordreference, and female here. Guess I'm too close minded.

Would you like to give some background information on yourself and your Chinese learning experience in the Why Chinese? thread?

[yifeng]

Language is not as same as subjects of nature sciences, such as mathematics and physics. There are always contradictory answers for some questions. Even in China, certain foundational issues of Chinese language are still in debate among language scholars. So trying to find a clear-cut rule to explain a language phenomenon sometimes fails.

 

As a language learner, not a language scholar, we try to explain a language phenomenon we see, and it is better that we learn more relative usages in the process, in other words, 举一反三. 

[rtf]

 

Raising questions and answering questions are important ways in learning a foreign language, especially for adults, aren't they?

 

@yifeng: You`re absolutely right. It`s hard to overestimate the role of foreign language forums like this one,so I bow to  people like Messidor, Messquito,Kenny同志, yifeng,BanZhiYun, Lanchong, HelloChineseApp, L-F-J, anonymoose,somethingfunny,davoosh for helping us learners,because however  great a manual could be (like mine,for instance),it`s impossible to spell out every little detail,especially with a charming but not the easiest language on our planet.I,personally,couldn`t be happier as thanks to you I`ve made progress already having been here for only a short time.

 

@imron: Also, thanks to the administration for keeping off irrelevant material from threads that we create to get precious answers (on Chinese) from experts,i.e. for making it possible for us learners  not to be distracted from why we are  here for,as many of us,including myself,are extremely busy during the day and don`t have a minute to waste on irrelevant stuff.I,for one,have my own students to teach,and in my spare time I,among many other things,self study Chinese.

 

 

Thanks again, and good luck!

[Messidor]

The two sentences mean the same to native students ---- there's a holiday !

 

 

To put it in a linguistic way, the two sentences have the same syntactic structure (subject+predicate*) but very different semantic relations ---- 学校放假了, the relation is more like agent + object, i.e. school has given the holiday (to students); while in 学生放假了, the relation is like receiver + object, i.e. the students has got the holiday; as in 国庆放假三天, the relation could be reason + action or time + action.**

Furthermore, it may be appropriate to analyze 放假 in 学校放假了 as a phrase-like word though, it's odd to do the same to that in 学生放假了; the latter shows more abstraction and the two characters are solidified completely ---- in fact some Chinese scholars argue that 离合词 are the words that are on the half way of solidification and abstraction, thus they can be single verbs in some sentences but be phrasal elsewhere.

 

----------------------------------

* 放假 is more a single word than a phrase (to Chinese) though they can be separated as in phrase 放三天假; Chinese call the verbs like this as 离合词.

** Semantic relation is the hotly debated issue today, and there're more sets of categories than consensus. So what I've written may not be the only explanations. Anyway, semantic analysis is very important to Chinese since syntactic analysis alone is often insufficient.

[rtf]

Messidor,谢谢你对我的帮助。

[Messidor]

@rtf  不谢。举手之劳。顺便我也练习一下英语的书面表达。