Extended use of complements of direction

[js6426]

Hey guys,

 

I missed a couple of days of class due to being sick, so tried going over this grammar by myself and with the grammar wiki.  I thought I had it figured out until I tried the exercises in my book and my teacher told me they were almost all wrong.  She said she will explain it to me tomorrow which is great, but it will all be in Chinese, and as of yet I am personally finding this the hardest bit of grammar I have come across.  The title I gave the topic was just the one it is given in my book - 汉语教程。

 

I will post some of the questions and answers I gave, and why I don't understand them.  If anyone is willing to help I would really appreciate it!

 

她难过得——了。A - 说不上来 B - 说不下去 C - 说不下来 D - 说不出来

 

I went with C, but apparently it's B.  The reason I chose C was because I thought '下来‘ indicated an action that fixes something or that an action (state) which started in the past continues to the present.  So I understood the sentence to be saying 'She sadly couldn't continue talking'.  Is the reason that the answer is B because the speech of the girl is moving away from her, and therefore 去 should be used instead of 来?

 

As I am looking back over these questions and grammar explanations I feel like I am getting myself more and more confused.  Would anyone be willing to break down into the simplest terms possible how Verb + 起来/出来/下去/下来 works?  Also I am thinking along the lines of verbs like laugh, write, speak, listen etc., rather than walk, run, climb etc.  Thank you so much!

[Ori_A]

The sentence is not "sadly couldn't continue talking", but rather "she is/was so sad, that she couldn't keep speaking". So yes, it means she probably spoke a little bit, but couldn't keep going because she was having a hard time.

 

To be honest, these complements are not easy to grasp, and are not easy to explain, even by some of the teachers. I'll try my best according to my limited knowledge.

 

起来 - I know of three uses: 

1. The most simple one, implying direction, as in 站起来，抬起来

2. Expressing the beginning of an action: 笑起来 would stress the fact that someone started laughing. Same with 动起来，做起来 , etc.

3. Expressing the change from something static, to a movement. It's actually very related to what I wrote in number 2, because they're usually used under similar circumstances.

 

出来 - I don't know of any use apart from "coming out", but it can be tricky, because it's very commonly used in abstract situations. 说出来，猜出来，想出来. Notice that in the abstract sense it also implies something coming out of nothing. For example, 想出来 would be thinking of something that I haven't thought about before, like a new idea, whereas 想起来 would be the recall /think up something that had already been in my head.

 

下去 - Again, there's the regular direction meaning. And then there's the continuation meaning. If I tell you to 听下去, I'm basically asking you to keep listening, because I didn't finish. 我听／做／说不下去 would mean that I can't or don't want to continue listening/speaking/doing. 活下去 would mean to keep living, (from this moment on) many times in the context of surviving.

 

下来 - As you said, one use would be expressing the process of the action, starting at a point in the past, until now. Hence the (not always clear) difference between 活下去 and 活下来 (living to this day, not from this day onwards).

Another common use is expressing a change from movement to non movement (as opposed to 起来). For example:

动起来 -> 停下来

固定下来 (making something permanent, stable, not able to change)

说起来 -> 安静下来

And many more examples.

There examples which are harder (for me) to explain, like:

热起来 -> 冷下来

胖起来 -> 瘦下来

 

You also have the 过来 and 过去, which I can't really explain. 

It's something like going to a different "place", in the abstract sense of the word. For example:

睡过去 —> 醒过来

We are all awake, he moved to a state of sleeping, so I use 过去. He woke up and "came back" to the world, so I'd use 过来.

Same goes for being sick. I'm not sure if it's correct to say 生病过去, but it is correct to say 康复过来, which means to get better, come back to the world of the healthy people.

 

All of the complements have their regular meanings of directions, which I didn't mention in some of the cases.

This is how I remember it without my notebook being with me. I'm sure that there are other meanings I don't remember or don't know. It's not easy to use correctly, and the best way to get it right is listen, and then listen again, and again, until you get it. Combined with the grammer explanation, it gets easier to use, but never too easy... not for me at least.

 

If I've got something wrong here, I hope someone corrects me..

 

I hope it helps! Good luck!

[somethingfunny]

For some of these it might be more useful to remember specific combinations.  When I learnt 下去 as "for an action to continue", I specifically learnt the example of something along the lines of: "你让他说下去吧".

 

Also, 说出来 isn't abstract.  Another example would be 站出来, which could be either abstract or not.

 

I wouldn't worry too much about nailing all of these right away.  Make sure you answer the questions and understand the ones you get wrong.  As long as you know what each one generally means and how they're used then you'll pick up the specific uses of each one as you are exposed to more examples.

 

I'd be interested to know why (d) isn't an acceptable answer.  她难过得说不出来了 seems very reasonable to me.

[js6426]

Thank you both so much, this is incredibly helpful.  I was interested to know why any of them weren't acceptable answers hah!  I like the idea of remembering a short specific example for each.  My only concern with nailing them right away is that I have an exam next Thursday and these will all be on there!  I didn't know about the non movement aspect of 下来 so that's incredibly helpful.  With the ones you said are hard to explain can I take a stab just to see if I am in the right ball park here?  热起来 --》冷下来 Could this be used for example with having heated up some food, only to find it is too hot, so then waiting for it to cool down?  The first seems a more literal bringing the food up to a hot temperature, whereas the second has the idea of that process of the food beginning to cool down, up until the point where it is cool enough to eat.  Is that a correct understanding of a way in which this could be used?

 

Thank you guys again, you have helped me a ton here!  Just as one final question - I don't suppose you know where I might find practice questions for this specific grammar piece?  I've done the ones in my book and on the grammar wiki the only other things available need to be purchased on Amazon, and I'd rather not buy whole books just to try a few questions!

[eddyf]

11 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

I'd be interested to know why (d) isn't an acceptable answer.  她难过得说不出来了 seems very reasonable to me.

I think there would have to be an object: 她难过得说不出话来. I don't really like having the 了 at the end either but I'm not totally sure why.

[Ori_A]

2 hours ago, eddyf said:

I think there would have to be an object: 她难过得说不出话来.

This makes sense, but then where is the object in 她难过得说不下去了? Shouldn't it be 她难过得话说不下去了?

 

4 hours ago, js6426 said:

热起来 --》冷下来 Could this be used for example with having heated up some food, only to find it is too hot, so then waiting for it to cool down?  The first seems a more literal bringing the food up to a hot temperature, whereas the second has the idea of that process of the food beginning to cool down, up until the point where it is cool enough to eat.

It sounds reasonable to me. I forgot that in English you also have the equivalent of "heat up" and "cool down", which makes it easier to understand. We don't have these things in Hebrew...

It can be understood as the temperature literally going up or down, or someone's body weight going up or down, which makes it more reasonable to use 热起来／胖起来 and their opposites. I don't know if that's the actual reason, but it makes sense to me.

[somethingfunny]

Here's something for a bit of a laugh.  This is from about five years ago just after I started my serious Chinese evening class.  I remember not really having much clue what was happening most of the time.

I do remember, however, thinking that 路是走出来的 was pretty much the coolest way of expressing something I had ever come across in any language.

[lips]

3 hours ago, Ori_A said:

where is the object in 她难过得说不下去了?

Where is the object in "She was so sad that she could not continue to speak"?

[Ori_A]

13 minutes ago, lips said:

Where is the object in "She was so sad that she could not continue to speak"?

A fair point, but also implies that the object is not the reason for (d) being a wrong answer, otherwise all four answers would be wrong. I assume 说 can be both transitive and an intransitive verb, just like "speak" in English.

But I'm no grammer expert, so..

[lips]

IMHO (D) can be correct.  It just has a different meaning from (B).

[js6426]

In a sense it's nice to see that other people at least have to talk about this, as it makes me feel like I'm not a total idiot!  My teacher explained it to me today and it really helped.  It was pretty much everything that has already been said, but for some reason it actually sounded a whole lot simpler in the Chinese than I thought it was going to!  Thank you all for the help!

[eddyf]

Yeah I still think D is wrong, or if not wrong then at least weird, or it needs to be put into some context to not be weird. 说下去 is usually intransitive, but 说出来 must be transitive as far as I can tell; therefore the object must either be in the sentence or implied from context. It's like saying "She was so sad that she couldn't say it." Not ungrammatical perhaps, but without any context it's a weird sentence because no one knows what "it" is.

[somethingfunny]

I'm convinced, I've now changed my position and think that (d) can not be correct. 

[Beelzebro]

On 6/7/2017 at 7:02 AM, somethingfunny said:

路是走出来的 

 

What does that mean? I'm struggling to figure out an English translation. Is it something along the lines of "we'll figure out the route as we go"? Sorry for necro.

[somethingfunny]

"The path is/was made by people walking it."

 

This whole discussion is very interesting, and I wonder if anyone can give us a definitive answer now.  After quickly reading over the comments again, I think I still agree that 说不下去 is OK, but that 说不出来 would require some mention of 话: 她难过的说不出来话了, although I can't decide if this sounds too clunky, or why it makes more sense grammatically.  It does make quite a significant difference to the meaning as well: "She felt unwell and couldn't carry on speaking" vs "She felt unwell and couldn't bring herself to say it".

 

Maybe I only find it interesting because it reminds me of this...

[amytheorangutan]

I feel like I have definitely heard Chinese people say D but whether it is gramatically correct or not I don’t know. 

[Beelzebro]

15 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

"The path is/was made by people walking it."

 

Ah, got it, thanks

 

Quote

This whole discussion is very interesting, and I wonder if anyone can give us a definitive answer now.  After quickly reading over the comments again, I think I still agree that 说不下去 is OK, but that 说不出来 would require some mention of 话

 

Agreed. 说不出话了 and 说不出话来了 both feel ok to me, as does moving the position of 话 like this: 一句话也说不出来了. But 说不出了 and 说不出来了 definitely sound off. There are expressions like 想不出来 that follow the same structure yet do not usually take an object, but that's because the object is implied by the surrounding context. Like:

 

还有什么呢？  

不知道，想不出来了  

 

So can we tentatively conclude that this usage of the 出来 result complement requires an object, either explicit or implied?

 

Edit: counter-example: 识别不出来. So the above conclusion isn't valid. I think that 说话 is just a very strong verb-object pair. Like, if you want to say "there are two people talking over there" you need to say 那边有两个人在说话, you can't say 那边有两个人在说. I think we're getting distracted by thinking about the 不出来 and 不下去 complements when the actual key point lies in the strong pairing of 说 and 话.

 

说不下去话了 does sound weird though. So the 不出来 and 不下去 complements do behave differently. Hmm.

[somethingfunny]

On 6/7/2017 at 2:03 PM, eddyf said:

说下去 is usually intransitive, but 说出来 must be transitive as far as I can tell; therefore the object must either be in the sentence or implied from context.

 

After thinking about it some more, this is still the comment I think is most close to being right.

 

I don’t see much problem using 说 by itself when the object is implied.

 

It seems 说 covers the grammatical ground covered by both “to say” and “to speak”.  The former transitive, the latter not.

[陳德聰]

她難過得說不出來了 is a conceivable utterance but only makes sense with additional context, as it begs the question of “what is the thing that she can’t put to words?” or “what is it that she cannot say?”

 

This is a multiple choice question. They make you pick the “best” answer in most cases, don’t they?

 

If you wanted something that is close to 難過得說不下去了, but using 出, you could say 難過得說不出話了, but obviously in one case the person has already started speaking and in the other that’s not necessarily true.

 

About intransitive vs transitive, this is indeed the reason, ish.

 

說 has multiple senses: at least 1) speak and 2) say.

 

說不下去 is to not be able to continue speaking.

 

說不出來 is to not be able to say [something] out (loud).