Help for research purposes?

[Jen23]

Hi,

 

I'm fairly new to the forum. I'm a linguist, interested in tone in languages, however (much as I try) I really haven't picked up a huge amount of Chinese yet.

 

As such, I was wondering whether anyone more proficient than I am might be able to offer anything on the below:

 

1. How do you say 'Can you find the ______?', for example 'Can you find the dog' in Mandarin?

 

2. I need to compile a list of monosyllabic common nouns in Mandarin. If anyone has any on the top of their head that they'd like to throw in my direction I'd be incredibly grateful. The more the merrier.

 

Thank you so much!

[陳德聰]

I'm curious, are you looking at sentence level or word level tone variation?

[Guest123]

 

 

I need to compile a list of monosyllabic common nouns in Mandarin

I'm afraid your list would be very very long.

In classical chinese all words are monosyllabic, that is one character - one syllable - one meaning.

In modern mandarin words still are basically monosyllabic. Those which are made of two, three or more syllables are combinations of characters that still keep their meanings and can be combined with other different charaters or, for a great part of them, can be used alone. 

For the "can you find the dog", here are a few examples : 你能不能找到狗？ 你能找到狗吗？狗你找得到吗？

[陳德聰]

I think the key word was "common" nouns. Things like hand, dog, cat, house, etc. This list will not be as long as the list of all monosyllabic words.

[Guest123]

I think it still would be too long, I wouldn't dare even to start that list

In ge.neral I think the very notion of monosyllabic or polysyllabic word in chinese is a sort of projection of indoeuropean way of thinking. For ex., 电梯， is it a word of two syllables or a notion composed of two words?

[889]

As well, "the dog" -- so simple as it sounds -- doesn't really translate well in Chinese if you're referring to one specific dog, since Chinese doesn't have definite/indefinite articles, nor does it ordinarily distinguish number.

[Guest123]

Well, if you really mean a specific dog, you can say for ex.  那条狗, but of course, it would depend on the context. 

[Mouseneb]

A few of the bajillions of monosyllabic nouns, for your enjoyment:

书

猫

镇

路

手

女

河

云

树

王

猪

海

Keep in mind that many of these are often combined with other characters to produce other nouns.

[lips]

Google is your friend.

[陳德聰]

For ex., 电梯， is it a word of two syllables or a notion composed of two words?

A word of two syllables.

 

Also in terms of "the", it's not really an issue.

 

手 在哪里？ "Where is the hand?"

狗 在哪里？ "Where is the dog?"

 

手 能找到吗? "Can you find the hand?"

狗 能找到吗？ "Can you find the dog?"

 

Etc.

[889]

The OP seems to be interested in Chinese from a linguistic sense, not as a practical way of actually finding her lost dog.

 

So to simply translate "Did you find the dog?" without telling her that the resulting translation could, depending on context, also mean "Did you find the dogs?" or "Did you find a dog?" isn't much help.

 

And of course, without context, we don't know whether "you" there is plural or singular, so we don't know whether to translate it as 你 or 你们.

 

Small points from the standpoint of practical Chinese, perhaps, but large ones from a linguistic perspective.

[陳德聰]

Somewhat/mostly disagree with 889. Typical linguistic research involves "eliciting" target words within a sentence, so my assumption is that OP who is concerned with tone is interested in studying some aspect of tone in individual words as part of a natural sentence, thus the use of a generic "where is the" or "can you find the" sentence. The main point is on the focused monosyllabic word which will then be used to determine something about how tone operates in monosyllabic words in focus position, most likely. Number (plural vs singular) likely isn't relevant, and definite vs indefinite is not an issue when you arrange the sentence properly in Chinese.

[889]

" . . . my assumption is that OP who is concerned with tense is interested in studying some aspect of tense in individual words as part of a natural sentence . . ."

 

She said she's interested in tone, not tense.

[陳德聰]

And that, my friends, is why you should not post while drunk. Tone, tense, tralalala

[席九还酹一江月]

There are many sequences in saying this and they are all considered correct. 你找的到狗吗？狗你找的到吗？你狗能找到吗？你有找到狗吗？你找到狗在哪了吗？狗在哪你找到了吗？