Comparative structures with verb and object

[DonCachopo]

Hi. I found a discrepance between two grammar books:

-Modern Mandarin Chinese grammar (page 209, section 29.3.5):

mmccomp.png

- An essential grammar (page 104, section 13.4.5)

Which one is right????

Thanks

Enviado desde mi SM-N9005 mediante Tapatalk

[Ruky]

I'm not qualified to say whether it is correct. However I googled 他比我吃饭吃得多 and only got results from modern Mandarin Chinese grammar and Lang8. I don't think that type of phrasing is used very much, but it's probably correct. I have Modern Mandarin Grammar and personally I feel like it's a waste of time, because whenever I have a question about some particular sentence, the grammar behind the sentence is not covered. Many of the example sentences seem not to be actually said by Chinese people.

[Wurstmann]

That's true. What I hear most often is something like 他饭吃的比我多。

[陳德聰]

Interesting... I just cycled through all of these:

A) X唱歌唱得比Y好聽

B) X唱歌比Y唱得好聽

C) X比Y唱歌唱得好聽

In one conversation just now. I prefer (A), but even ( C) is not really that awkward if you remove the 唱歌 and make it 我比他唱得好聽. I think this is likely more a question of popular use than it is "right" and "wrong".

[lips]

As with many such phrases, in different situations, they may have slightly different meanings.

[陳德聰]

As with many such phrases, in different situations, they may have slightly different meanings.

I don't really agree. I think they mean exactly the same thing and the placement of the 比Y is flexible.

[Ruky]

I'm just perplexed why a grammar book would include a dupplication of a verb in the example sentence, when there are other forms said much more often. If I ever learn Chinese to a high level, I'm going to write a grammar book with examples from tv, novels, and newspapers and cite then to illustrate the Grammar points.

[BanZhiYun]

I guess the book you're reading has a mistake, but oh well. Basically the construction they are talking about should be:
NP1 (a living thing, aka person I'd assume) ＋ 比 ＋ NP2 (living thing, person) ＋V ＋ 的 + NP3 (non-living thing) + adj./AP.

 

Or it could transfer into -> NP1 (a living thing, aka person I'd assume) ＋ 比 ＋ NP2 (living thing, person) ＋V ＋ 得 + adj./AP.
 

 

So, the example they gave in fact should be:
1. 他比我吃的饭多。

or

2. 他比我吃得多。

 

3. 弟弟比妹妹写的字快。

4. 弟弟比妹妹写得快。

 

The second pattern is more common, according to my book. Overall, I'd really suggest reading books in Chinese, if you can manage that. (I am sure you can.)

[陳德聰]

他比我吃的飯多 would more naturally be rendered as 他吃的飯比我多... Even though they're both shortened versions of 他吃的飯比我吃的飯多.

The first one sounds like some kind of prescriptivist's sick joke.

[BanZhiYun]

^Well, nope. I won't be arguing with you again. There is your's and a BNU's professor's opinion there. Everyone can pick for themselves. Anyway, everything is written in the textbook and is on the pictures. When you have 吃饭、写字、唱歌, these are 动宾型 verbs, that can be used in the above 2 structures. If you use only "吃、写、常", then that's a different story.

[陳德聰]

There's literally nothing to argue. Your own source material confirms that they are "interchangeable" grammatically (14 and 12), and reality confirms that 14句式 is more frequent than 12句式. It just follows logically that when presented with the ability to choose both from a grammatical standpoint, people would choose the more frequently occuring variant, which then becomes the more natural and idiomatic variant. That's probably why almost nobody will use the structure to say 你比我唱的歌好听 when they can say 你唱的(歌)比我好听.

 

Edit: Maybe when you are more proficient in Mandarin you will be able to learn things that are outside of a textbook.

[eddyf]

It never ceases to surprise me how much info in published books is questionable or flat out wrong. Maybe it's because they're trying too hard to construct examples to illustrate their rule and they're not doing a good job of it. The complete set of rules that governs how people choose to express themselves is way too complicated to write down (and not universal either). Lists of grammar rules are only a crude approximation that might help for understanding input but are woefully inadequate for generating output. I stopped trusting grammar rules as soon as I left the beginner stage. Now the only thing I trust is frequency of usage in a large enough corpus.

 

As to the example in question, empirically speaking it seems by far the most common way to say it is 他比我吃得多 or 他吃的比我多. The 饭 doesn't really add anything to it and it's better to just leave it out. So it's simply a bad choice of example to illustrate the grammatical point that they were trying to illustrate. Same thing for 写字 and 唱歌, you can leave out the object. I could be wrong but it seems to me like comparative structures with a verb and object are sort of inherently awkwardly wordy and native speakers prefer to avoid them by leaving out the object or otherwise restructuring the sentence. For times when the object really can't be left out, I think you can't go wrong with the structures in post #4.

 

Btw I think this works too: 他唱歌比我好听