When to use shi 是？

[IanK]

Hello,

 

I'm new at learning Chinese and have a question about when shì is used. From what I understand: 她是大学生 is correct... She IS a college student. But then you don't use shi when you say 她是高...She IS tall, you just say 她高。

 

Can someone help understand when I should use shi and when I don't.

 

谢谢

 

Ian

 

[somethingfunny]

是 is used to connect two nouns or pronouns. In your first example it is connecting the pronoun "She" and the noun "university student".

 

It can't be used in the second because 是 is not used to connect nouns or pronouns to adjectives - "tall" is an adjective.

[gwr71]

Dear Newbie,

The confusion is the use of shi as a noun or state verb.  A state verb is translated as "to be...." .  so "to be tall " is  高。the sentence she is tall is : 她高。  the word " student" is 学生。

[Publius]

In your first sentence 她是大学生, 是 is similar to the English linking verb 'to be'. But similar doesn't mean the same.

In English, a linking verb joins the subject of a sentence to its complement. The complement can be a noun, "She is a student"; an adjective, "She is tall"; or a prepositional phrase, "She is at home".

In other words,

Sentence = Subject + Predicate

Predicate = Linking Verb + Complemnt

 

But in Chinese and some Asian languages, an adjective can predicate a sentence by itself. They are not the same adjectives as you know in European languages. They are stative verbs. (It's more apparent in Japanese, where the so-called adjectives conjugate like a verb, that is, according to tense, mood, etc.)

So technically, 高 doesn't mean 'tall', it means 'to be tall'.

她 (Subject 'She') + 高 (Predicate 'is tall') is a complete sentence. No room for an extra 是.

 

This is also why 的 is used to link an adjective to the noun it modifies the same way it turns a verbal phrase into a relative clause.

漂亮的她 ✔ 'she, who is beautiful'

漂亮她 ✘

我买的书 ✔ 'the book that I bought'

我买书 ✘ (a sentence, not a noun phrase)

Because 漂亮 is a stative verb. There is no true 'adjective' in Chinese.

Also 她 is a noun. There is no true 'pronoun' in Chinese.

They are just called adjectives and pronouns for convenience sake. They behave differently from their European counterparts.

[IanK]

This is so very helpful thank you all. 

[DavyJonesLocker]

These two are very useful for grammar and explain all the uses of 是。

I would buy both as the 2nd one has some very good chapters of the use of 是。 You can dip in and out of them from beginner stage 

Oh and if you can do the exercises you will know your grammar !

 

Basic Chinese Grammar

Intermediate Chinese Grammar

 

 

On 10/22/2017 at 8:49 AM, Publius said:

 

她 (Subject 'She') + 高 (Predicate 'is tall') is a complete sentence. No room for an extra 是.

 

On 10/22/2017 at 3:18 AM, somethingfunny said:

It can't be used in the second because 是 is not used to connect nouns or pronouns to adjectives - "tall" is an adjective.

 

well 是 can be used with adjectives for certain circumstances, right? (Stative verbs? @Publius.)

e.g.

 

for emphasis

A) 那个人那么高

B) 她是很高！

 

or element reservation

那个孩子是很聪明但是有点儿懒

 

non-gradable adjs

我的老师是男的

 

Open to correction. My grammar is rusty to say the least!

 

[Publius]

@DavyJonesLockerYes, but in the first two sentences, 是 does not serve as a linking verb. To prove it, I can remove the 是 and the sentence remains grammatical (only the tone changes). Actually 很 is more like a linking verb here.

This usage of 是 indicates an agreement with the interlocutor. It's the same 是 used to concede a point. It turns a general statement into an acknowledgement of a specific fact. Notice what follows this 是 can be a verbal element, e.g. 我是没吃饭但是我不饿, further proof that it is not a linking verb.

 

In the third sentence, I disagree with your classification of 男的 as an adjective. I can insert a classifier 一个 before it, so it must be a noun phrase. Whether 男/女 is an adjective is open to debate. But 男的/女的 certainly is not. One of the main functions of 的 is nominalization. It turns anything before it into a noun phrase, including normal verbs, e.g. 我的老师是教体育的. Actually, that's how the 是...的 construction works: 是 expects a noun, 的 turns everything into a noun, satisfying the expectation. Can I therefore conclude that 是 can be used with anything? I hardly think so.

That last sentence in fact proved my point, that Chinese "adjectives" are verbs. There is no adjectives in Chinese. Whether they are gradable is moot.

 

[Jan Finster]

Based on the above, can someone explain to me why it is "杯子是空的" and not ""杯子很空的" or "杯子空了"?

[sanchuan]

Isn't it just a case of 空 not being scalar (or "gradable", to use the definition given upthread)? A cup that's not in a Schroedinger's box can only be either empty or not empty - so no scalar constructions allowed.

 

I would likewise raise an eyebrow or two at "the cup is very empty" or even "the cup is turning / has turned empty" in English.

 

Unless by 空了 you mean that the cup is "being emptied" or "has been emptied"? In that case you're just being tricked by the fact that the adjective "empty" and the verb "to empty' are the same word in English. Chinese would likely use some other word to mean "is being / has been drained". Maybe something with "pour out".

 

I wouldn't personally say that 空了 is ungrammatical though, as it can be used as a verb to mean vacate (wouldn't 房间空了 be grammatical, I wonder). So it may just be the wrong verb to use with "cup" in that context.

[Guest realmayo]

Yes, I believe same applies for other things e.g. colours.

 

As for previous suggestion that Chinese has no adjectives, I always wonder in that case what part of speech something like 公共 would be? Some people use "attributive", to market that category as different from the stative verbs that most English speakers think of as adjectives.

[sanchuan]

On 10/16/2022 at 11:14 AM, realmayo said:

Chinese has no adjectives

That's intended to mean adjectives are in fact verbs. To be precise, they're verbs of the stative kind (ie roughly conceivable, from an English point of view, as having an inherent "to be" in them).

 

The thing is, stative verbs are unexceptionable as far as language features go. (If you ask me, it's adjectives that are a rather peculiar (sophisticated?) part of speech in Indo-European languages.)

 

What's peculiar in 公共, I think, is the extraordinary fact that verbs can be nouns in Chinese (and often vice versa) without any form of affixation or inflection. 

 

You see, on the face of it, I would say that 公共 is simply a verbal compound that, by sheer happenstance of usage, is only used attributively. But my sense is that the cause (or the consequence) of this usage is that any verbal sense of 公共 has long been bleached and this stative verb is now only used as a noun, whether in attributive form (公共汽车 bus) or otherwise (小公共 minibus). This means we should interpret a phrase like 公共汽车 not as "public bus" but rather "people/community bus". 

 

That said, I don't think it's often used as a noun to any major extent so, speculations aside, it's probably safer to say that it's simply an adjective (ie a stative verb) of restricted use (ie highly fixed/idiomatic).

 

 

[Guest realmayo]

I not sure how you can call 公共 a stative verb if it can't be used as a verb! And you go on to suggest it doesn't describe a state either. Plenty of other words too, which in English grammar we'd want to call adjectives, and which in Chinese grammar we cannot call stative verbs.

 

 

[sanchuan]

On 10/16/2022 at 3:30 PM, realmayo said:

how you can call 公共 a stative verb if it can't be used as a verb

Simply by reference to both its semantics ("the state of being public/communal") and costituent parts. And, you know, any dictionary.

 

But I suppose we agree that usage doesn't care about any of that, so I guess it could just as well be thought of as a noun.

 

What else can it be? I'm unsure about "attributive" as a class of words. The fact that 公共 is mostly used attributively, whether as a verb or as a noun, isn't really problematic. Yes, we could, for the sake of analysis, define a class of words as "attributive", but it feels like an unnecessary cop-out. It's already established that grammatical classes have a whole range of prototypical features that aren't all present to the same degree in all of their members. For example, some nouns can be countable and concrete and can take 一个, while others are uncountable and abstract and can't take 一个. Similarly, I would say some are even more abstract/derivative than others and can only be used attributively to other nouns. 

 

In English, both "bright" and "sunlit" are classified as adjectives. Like 公共, "sunlit" can only be used attributively, but it's still called an adjective, isn't it? By the same token, 公共 can only be used attributively, but it could still called a stative verb (or nominalised stative verb, ie a noun, like 中华 "the middle flourishing", which is also mainly used attributively). 

 

So I think it's simply about some nouns or verbs being more or less restricted in their noun-ness or verb-ness due to usage patterns.

[Guest realmayo]

Isn't this a bit circular? The reason people (me included) like the "stative verb" description instead of "adjective" is because of its accuracy. If you're going to make it less accurate (by including stative verbs which aren't verbs and arguably define a property rather than a state), then I don't see the difference between saying either

(i) "among Chinese adjectives, most but not all function as verbs", or 

(ii) "among Chinese stative verbs, most but not all fuction as verbs"

 

... and just relying on people hopefully picking up usage patterns to explain which is which. We're not talking just one or two words. I think there are loads, e.g. 上述、中性、丰乳、主导、人为、优胜、全盘、一对一....

[sanchuan]

So you would like a distinct name for this class of words, like "adjective" or "attributive", because they're too different from either nouns or verbs and because learners would benefit from studying them as a distinct category - is that correct?

 

If so, point taken. I agree the current state of the art doesn't do enough to help the learner "notice" them (in a pedagogical sense). 

 

But just like they don't have all the properties of either nouns or verbs, they don't have all the properties of what we'd call adjectives, either. So I'm not sure about the benefits of setting up a whole new macro category just for them, as opposed to defining them as a subgroup of, say, verbs (eg +nonscalar, +nominalised, +attributive). After all, a longer descriptive name might be preferable if, as you say, we want accuracy. Problem is agreeing on one!

 

 

[Guest realmayo]

If you call them "attributives", pace deFrancis, then you're saying: this is a special type of word which has only one specific function (attributive).

But you could call them anything at all ... the point is that having a specific category frees you from ever having to use the unsatisfactory word "adjective"! Rather than saying 高 is sometimes a verb and an adjective but 公共 is only an adjective and not a verb, you can just say: that one belongs to the category "stative verb" (with a predictable usage), and that one belongs to the category "attributive" (with a predictable usage). I think without the category "attributive" (or alternative word) it's hard to reply to someone who says "why use complicated terms like 'stative verb', just call them adjectives duh!"