Where is the verb in 便宜点儿吧？

[Shelley]

(or my native tongue for example).

 

What is your native tongue?

[BanZhiYun]

@Shelley It's Bulgarian.

[BanZhiYun]

@Shelley Let me share a link here. It is talking about the predicate in Chinese, so I find it very appropriate (besides being in Chinese). The whole 公众号 is quite useful, IMO. It was posted yesterday, it was my fave share of the day.

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzIxMDA4Mjg2OQ==&mid=2668975673&idx=1&sn=d34dbb0bd2766d1217e8bdcee3a63f26&scene=1&srcid=0508SJLuzhvmJHWoonP0tSrv&key=b28b03434249256bf2809ee6b1d153e0d210123aa3643ac5bc85edbb5c1e47d1cdbd147b30ea09b26d595804b007c299&ascene=0&uin=MTI1NzAzNDQzNQ%3D%3D&devicetype=iMac+MacBookPro12%2C1+OSX+OSX+10.11.4+build(15E65)&version=11020201&pass_ticket=YwCBW3q%2Bmss9mw3v0i%2BLDzQkv3dl80VOj%2BPVWSnvMPd13UkaWFvdLR3Pd4%2BaA%2FZA

(I hope you can open it!)

[Lu]

You can, though, use parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective etc.) to classify words, but these classifications are not eternal. E.g.: “我喜欢学习” (学习 here is a noun, right? 我喜欢什么？喜欢学习）and then ”我学习英语“ (学习 here is a verb, 我做什么？学习 英语）.

Is that really correct though? If I'm not mistaken, a verb can still be an object. Consider the English 'I like to read' or the Dutch 'Ik hou van hardlopen': 'to read' and 'hardlopen' (jogging) are certainly both subject and verb here.

[Shelley]

@BanZhiYun thanks for sharing, I guess there must be some differences in grammar between Bulgarian, English, and Chinese.

 

Thanks for the link but I think you have over estimated my level of chinese , I will have to find my old school books and do some revision.

[BanZhiYun]

Exactly, so a verb (part of speech) can have different syntax functions in a sentence (subject, predicate, object). Now, the English example you've given, in English you have to modify the word somehow for it to have a different grammatical usage (in your example, add "to read", if I said "I like read" then that'd be a 病句 in English). Another specific in  Chinese grammar is "缺乏形态变化 e.g：

英雄 = hero  heroine  heroes
桌子 = desk  desks"

 

So saying that 学习 is a "verb" is not exactly accurate when it comes to Chinese. Because for an English (or as I've said, my native tongue speakers) verbs can only be predicates.(Correct me if I'm wrong) So in conclusion, even though we can classify words as different parts of speech in Chinese,it's a little bit different from that of many other languages. I am not an expert on English, but I believe it'd be correct saying "I like reading" opposed to "I like to read" or there might be some slight difference between them. That's my 语感 there (when it comes to English, lol). People more knowledable should comment on that.

[Guest realmayo]

Definitely a noun: I like Reading

[BanZhiYun]

So the original word (read) should add some additional morphemes to become a noun. There's no need for additional morphemes in Chinese to do that. So classifying words as "verb", "noun" eg. parts of speech, is not 100% accurate in Chinese. Thanks for your insight @realmayo!

[陳德聰]

I don't want to get too picky since you didn't come here to argue, but I think your 學習 example is not necessarily showing that it does not fit into the "verb" category. You used the question "你喜歡什麼?", but you can also answer "我喜歡學習" if someone asks you "你喜歡做什麼?"

Yes Chinese lacks inflectional morphology, but that isn't really relevant to whether it has word categories or not. I think what you've noticed is actually just that many words in Chinese can perform the function of a "verb" in some contexts and "noun" in others. I don't think this means that the categories don't exist, but that some words can belong to more than one. It happens in English too, though I don't know about Bulgarian, that words like "paint" can be both the verb and the noun.

[BanZhiYun]

You have a point there, Chinese and English are both analytical languages overall (even if Chinese's 程度 is much higher than English's). I said you can classify them as parts of speech, but it's more or less misleading to most foreigners. From my point of view, it'd be much easier to teach foreigners how to distinguish them by syntax functions rather than classifying words as parts of speech. Because most foreigners get really confused by that.

P.S. To your second question： 你喜欢做什么? 喜欢(verb-predicate)学习(noun-object) 动宾结构）In the other example, 你做什么？我学习(verb-predicate)英语(noun-object) 动宾结构) That's just some additional analysis.

[陳德聰]

I see. I think I just assumed you were trying to say that classifying parts of speech doesn't work in Chinese, but now I understand that you just meant it can be confusing for people. For future reference, the object of a verb is actually part of the predicate of a sentence.

As for your additional example of "你喜歡做什麼?", I'm not quite sure what you're trying to point out. I was contrasting 你喜歡什麼 and 你喜歡做什麼 because of the fact that the second one is asking for an action/activity specifically, and that you cannot answer ＊我喜歡做學習, but rather have to replace the entire [做什麼] with your answer.

[BanZhiYun]

Yeah, that's my point, on first level syntax analysis (层次分析法），we can only separate the sentence in 2 parts （主谓) in this case; then on the second level, we can go on and say that 学习英语 is a 动宾结构 etc. But if we said that the whole sentence is 主谓宾结构 is wrong according to 层次分析法, because on each level, you can only separate them in 2 parts. To answer “做什么？” (we need a predicate answer, right?) then we answer with ”学习英语" (it's a 谓语, it itself is a 动宾式谓语）. That's what I was referring to in this case.

[陳德聰]

Yes but I was saying that the "predicate answer" (I don't think I would call it that based on what predicate means) can be just 學習.

[BanZhiYun]

That's fair enough as well, 学习 is still a verb~predicate. In 学习英语 you just add an object. My point was that 学习 can be either a predicate or an object, neither of which are based on it being a verb.

[BanZhiYun]

My bad.

[陳德聰]

Keeping in mind that an entire clause can be an object, it may be important to note that the terms "subject", "predicate", "object" really just refer to positions and functions in a sentence, so yes they are independent of word class, but in some cases, only certain types of words can occupy certain positions. Like you mentioned, 動詞謂語句 and 形容詞謂語句. This means that when 學習 is the object of 喜歡, there is structural ambiguity between whether it is a noun or a verb, because both are possible in this case, though one is a much more comfortable interpretation for me (whenever I think of 喜歡釣魚，喜歡吃飯，喜歡逛街 etc, I do not interpret the objects of 喜歡 as noun phrases but as verb phrases unless forced to by a question like 你喜歡什麼 and/or alternatives that are nouns like 你喜歡高爾夫球嗎？釣魚呢？ etc). But the crucial point is that it cannot be simultaneously both a noun and a verb in the same sentence, and even though the surface string is the same, the internal syntactic structure of the sentence changes depending on whether it's a noun or a verb, as would the semantic interpretation.

[BanZhiYun]

Yeah, you are right. That very same example could be simified even more in asking 你喜欢什么？(我)喜欢学习(英语) My point was that in this case 喜欢 is the predicate that takes 动词短语 as an object. I forgot to mention that word order is crucial to the syntax funcution of the words.(I assume most people here know that, though) And yes, only certain type of words can be some parts of the sentence, but Chinese is still much more leniant compared with other languages. Then again, for 谓语，we could also have a 名词谓语句 and 主谓谓语句。 I don't know whether English has so many types of predicate or if there are sinilarities with the Chinese`s structure. My point all in all is that classifying the words according to parts of speech is a bit confusing to foreigners, especially to people learning basics. However, that doesn't mean we don't have to learn that at intermediate or advanced level.