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| LEE Sau Dan... |
 Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 8:22 am |
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[quote]Das gestern bei Kaufhof gekaufte Waschmachine ist kaputt.
How do you insert "gestern", "bei Kaufhof", etc. into the
equivalent English participle phrase? Is that a phrase, or just
an adjective (derived from a verb)?
[/quote]
John> "That washing machine bought yesterday at the department store
John> is fucked."
No no no. The whole phrase "bought yesterday at the dept. store" is not
an adjectival phrase, because it's not in the position of an adjective
(i.e. before the noun being modified and after the
article/demonstrative).
Therefore, I say English has no equivalent of German's Partizip I/II.
You can use the past participle in English as an adjective (e.g. "the
sold item", "an unpaid bill"), but you cannot add other parts to that
participle as in German (e.g. "Das gestern schon zu einer Frau verkaufte
Angebot", "Eine bis heute noch unbezahlte Rechnung") or Chinese. The
fact that you have to use another construction to translate the above
sentence clearly demonstrates this claim.
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| Joachim Pense... |
| Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 9:27 am |
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LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
[quote]"John" == John Atkinson <johnacko at (no spam) bigpond.com> writes:
John> Chinese (especially Mandarin) is highly atypical
John> typologically. Its basic order in the clause is SVO (except
John> for the BA construction), but in nearly every other respect it
John> behaves like an archetypical SOV language.
Perhaps, one should forget about the SOV, SVO typology when examining
Chinese, Japanese and some other East-Asian languages. Those languages
are better understood using the topic-comment model than SVO or SOV.
[/quote]
At least Japanese is a fairly typical OV language.
BTW, can the verb also be a topic? I guess it can't, and if you want to
say "as for learning, I'm doing it" would be something like "narau-koto-wa,
watashi suru".
Joachim
[quote]
John> I don't. How do you define the term "relative pronoun"?
even when it is omitted.
John> When there's nothing there, how do you know something has been
John> omitted?
Because those sentences have the same meaning when those missing "that"s
are added back.
John> (Has something been omitted from that last sentence of mine?
Yes. A "that" after "know".
John> Is it a relative pronoun?
No.
John> Reasons?)
That "that" is for introducing a subordinate clause.
But English has no Partizip I/II like those in German or Chinese.
John> I don't know what you mean by "Partizip I/II" in Chinese (I
John> didn't know that Chinese had "participles" of any kind!), but
John> English certainly does have participle phrases that modify
John> nouns, and, as far as I can tell, uses them about as often as
John> German does.
But those participle phrases in English can't be as decorated as the
German equivalent. Try to translate:
Das gestern bei Kaufhof gekaufte Waschmachine ist kaputt.
How do you insert "gestern", "bei Kaufhof", etc. into the equivalent
English participle phrase? Is that a phrase, or just an adjective
(derived from a verb)?
[/quote] |
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| LEE Sau Dan... |
| Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 10:05 am |
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[quote]"Joachim" == Joachim Pense <snob at (no spam) pense-mainz.eu> writes:
[/quote]
Joachim> LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
[quote]"John" == John Atkinson <johnacko at (no spam) bigpond.com> writes:
John> Chinese (especially Mandarin) is highly atypical[/quote]
John> typologically. Its basic order in the clause is SVO (except
John> for the BA construction), but in nearly every other respect it
John> behaves like an archetypical SOV language.
[quote]
Perhaps, one should forget about the SOV, SVO typology when
examining Chinese, Japanese and some other East-Asian languages.
Those languages are better understood using the topic-comment
model than SVO or SOV.
[/quote]
Joachim> At least Japanese is a fairly typical OV language.
Yes. But the difference between the post-positions "ga" and "wa"
suggests strongly that the topic-comment construction is dominant,
doesn't it?
Joachim> BTW, can the verb also be a topic? I guess it can't,
But you can always use a noun-ified form of the word. In German, that's
called Nominalisierung.
Joachim> and if you want to say "as for learning, I'm doing it"
Joachim> would be something like "narau-koto-wa, watashi suru".
I think so. I'm not so familiar with Japanese, but I do know the -koto
construction to form the noun. In Chinese, you can easily using the
verb as a noun, and you can of course put it at the beginning of a
sentence (or a topic-comment1-comment2-... sequence).
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| Nathan Sanders... |
| Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 10:09 am |
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In article <87pr8aw7y7.fsf at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de>,
LEE Sau Dan <danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
[quote]Das gestern bei Kaufhof gekaufte Waschmachine ist kaputt.
How do you insert "gestern", "bei Kaufhof", etc. into the
equivalent English participle phrase? Is that a phrase, or just
an adjective (derived from a verb)?
John> "That washing machine bought yesterday at the department store
John> is fucked."
No no no. The whole phrase "bought yesterday at the dept. store" is not
an adjectival phrase, because it's not in the position of an adjective
(i.e. before the noun being modified and after the
article/demonstrative).
[/quote]
That's not the only position adjectives can occur in in a noun phrase:
(1) The townsfolk angry at Frankenstein formed a mob.
Indeed, post-nominal position is required when the adjective takes a
complement:
(2) *The angry at Frankenstein townsfolk formed a mob.
In contrast, bare adjectives typically must be pre-nominal:
(3) The angry townsfolk formed a mob.
(4) *The townsfolk angry formed a mob.
Although there are a few well-known exceptions (conjoined adjectives
can often appear on either side of the noun; certain adjectives like
"galore", "aplenty", "elect", and "alone" can only be post-nominal;
and "present" and "responsible" can have different meanings depending
on their position):
(5) Townsfolk young and old gathered in the square.
(6) Young and old townsfolk gathered in the square.
(7) There were pitchforks galore/aplenty.
( *There were galore/aplenty pitchforks.
(9) The spokesman elect handed out pitchforks.
(10) *The elect spokesman handed out pitchforks.
(11) One pitchfork alone can skewer a dozen monsters.
(12) *One alone pitchfork can skewer a dozen monsters.
(13) All townsfolk present received a pitchfork.
`...attendees...'
(14) All present townsfolk received a pitchfork.
`...current residents...'
(15) The scientist responsible will be skewered.
`...liable...''
(16) The responsible scientist will be skewered.
`...trustworthy...'
And of course, numerous (semi-)fixed expressions: arms akimbo, God
Almighty, attorney general, heir apparent, times past, best X
possible, burrito supreme, Bud Light, etc.
[quote]Therefore, I say English has no equivalent of German's Partizip I/II.
You can use the past participle in English as an adjective (e.g. "the
sold item", "an unpaid bill"), but you cannot add other parts to that
participle as in German (e.g. "Das gestern schon zu einer Frau verkaufte
Angebot", "Eine bis heute noch unbezahlte Rechnung") or Chinese.
[/quote]
(15) The townsfolk angered by Frankenstein formed a mob.
(16) The townsfolk given pitchforks skewed the monster.
As with ordinary adjectives, the past participle prefers to be on the
right when it has a complement.
Nathan
--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/ |
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| Joachim Pense... |
| Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 10:24 am |
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LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
[quote]construction to form the noun. In Chinese, you can easily using the
verb as a noun, and you can of course put it at the beginning of a
sentence (or a topic-comment1-comment2-... sequence).
[/quote]
I suppose you don't need any additional morpheme to transform a noun into a
verb, just put it to the right place in the sentence. Do you have topic
marker morphemes in Chinese?
Joachim |
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| Bart Mathias... |
| Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 1:13 pm |
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Joachim Pense wrote:
[quote][...]
At least Japanese is a fairly typical OV language.
BTW, can the verb also be a topic? I guess it can't, and if you want to
say "as for learning, I'm doing it" would be something like "narau-koto-wa,
watashi suru".
[/quote]
If you don't put a "-wa" (contrastive) after "watasi" that sounds to me
more like "narau koto-wa watasi(ga) suru" 'As for learning, I (am the
one who) will do it."
(A bit silly either way. How about "narau koto-wa ii koto-da")? |
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| Joachim Pense... |
| Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 3:33 pm |
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Bart Mathias (in sci.lang):
[quote]Joachim Pense wrote:
[...]
At least Japanese is a fairly typical OV language.
BTW, can the verb also be a topic? I guess it can't, and if you want to
say "as for learning, I'm doing it" would be something like
"narau-koto-wa, watashi suru".
If you don't put a "-wa" (contrastive) after "watasi" that sounds to me
more like "narau koto-wa watasi(ga) suru" 'As for learning, I (am the
one who) will do it."
[/quote]
Yes.
[quote](A bit silly either way. How about "narau koto-wa ii koto-da")?
[/quote]
Well, but what I wanted to discuss is not substantivation of a verb, but
topicalisation. Can you say: "Learn I do."? Something like this.
Joachim |
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| DKleinecke... |
| Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 4:13 pm |
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On Oct 26, 8:27 am, Joachim Pense <s... at (no spam) pense-mainz.eu> wrote:
[quote]LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
"John" == John Atkinson <johna... at (no spam) bigpond.com> writes:
John> Chinese (especially Mandarin) is highly atypical
John> typologically. Its basic order in the clause is SVO (except
John> for the BA construction), but in nearly every other respect it
John> behaves like an archetypical SOV language.
Perhaps, one should forget about the SOV, SVO typology when examining
Chinese, Japanese and some other East-Asian languages. Those languages
are better understood using the topic-comment model than SVO or SOV.
At least Japanese is a fairly typical OV language.
BTW, can the verb also be a topic? I guess it can't, and if you want to
say "as for learning, I'm doing it" would be something like "narau-koto-wa,
watashi suru".
Joachim
John> I don't. How do you define the term "relative pronoun"?
>> even when it is omitted.
John> When there's nothing there, how do you know something has been
John> omitted?
Because those sentences have the same meaning when those missing "that"s
are added back.
John> (Has something been omitted from that last sentence of mine?
Yes. A "that" after "know".
John> Is it a relative pronoun?
No.
John> Reasons?)
That "that" is for introducing a subordinate clause.
>> But English has no Partizip I/II like those in German or Chinese.
John> I don't know what you mean by "Partizip I/II" in Chinese (I
John> didn't know that Chinese had "participles" of any kind!), but
John> English certainly does have participle phrases that modify
John> nouns, and, as far as I can tell, uses them about as often as
John> German does.
But those participle phrases in English can't be as decorated as the
German equivalent. Try to translate:
Das gestern bei Kaufhof gekaufte Waschmachine ist kaputt..
How do you insert "gestern", "bei Kaufhof", etc. into the equivalent
English participle phrase? Is that a phrase, or just an adjective
(derived from a verb)?
[/quote]
Shouldn't verb second languages be considered as topic first languages
with verb initial remainders?
Not 100% trivial. Classical Arabic is called a VSO language but even
in the Qur'an there are a lot of topic first sentences (and very few
sentences with overt subjects - other than Allah who is named
frequently). In the transition to modern Arabics the topic became
required and specialized to the subject and presto SVO languages. |
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| LEE Sau Dan... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:52 am |
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[quote]"Joachim" == Joachim Pense <snob at (no spam) pense-mainz.eu> writes:
[/quote]
Joachim> LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
[quote]construction to form the noun. In Chinese, you can easily using
the verb as a noun, and you can of course put it at the beginning
of a sentence (or a topic-comment1-comment2-... sequence).
[/quote]
Joachim> I suppose you don't need any additional morpheme to
Joachim> transform a noun into a verb,
Right. How would you otherwise interpret "use the verb as a noun"?
Joachim> just put it to the right place in the sentence.
Basically, although for some verb, we would find it better (but not
compulsory) to substitute with another noun. That is in consideration
of language habits. (Just like that it is more preferred to say in
English "none of them showed up" than to say "each of them did not show
up".)
Joachim> Do you have topic marker morphemes in Chinese?
Well... no. We don't have compulsory markers like <ga>/<wa> in
Japanese. We do, however, have emphasizing particles that can be used
for marking the topic. Their use is optional, and they're used only
when we want to emphasize the topic.
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| LEE Sau Dan... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:52 am |
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[quote]"DKleinecke" == DKleinecke <dkleinecke at (no spam) gmail.com> writes:
Das gestern bei Kaufhof gekaufte Waschmachine ist kaputt.
How do you insert "gestern", "bei Kaufhof", etc. into the
equivalent English participle phrase? Is that a phrase, or
just an adjective (derived from a verb)?
[/quote]
DKleinecke> Shouldn't verb second languages be considered as topic
DKleinecke> first languages with verb initial remainders?
I always consider German to be a verb-last language, with the exception
that in the main clause, the stem part (i.e. detached from the separable
prefix) of the inflected verb gets moved to the second position.
But I'd agree with you that in the main clause, the part before the verb
(which has been moved to the second position as described above) does
serve as a topic. At least it does so in most situations. (But in
"Gestern wurde getanzt", I'm would not consider "gestern" to be an
emphasized topic. Perhaps, it's better to say "Getanzt wurde gestern"?)
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| LEE Sau Dan... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:52 am |
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[quote]"Bart" == Bart Mathias <mathias at (no spam) hawaii.edu> writes:
[/quote]
Bart> Joachim Pense wrote:
[quote][...] At least Japanese is a fairly typical OV language.
BTW, can the verb also be a topic? I guess it can't, and if you
want to say "as for learning, I'm doing it" would be something
like "narau-koto-wa, watashi suru".
[/quote]
Bart> If you don't put a "-wa" (contrastive) after "watasi" that
Bart> sounds to me more like "narau koto-wa watasi(ga) suru" 'As for
Bart> learning, I (am the one who) will do it."
Well... why not drop the "watashi-ga" altogether?
Bart> (A bit silly either way. How about "narau koto-wa ii
Bart> koto-da")?
Why not "narau koto-wa ii?" (informal)
or "narau koto-wa ii desu-ka?" (formal) ?
(I'm not sure if these are good Japanese questions, though.)
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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| Helmut Richter... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:20 am |
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On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, LEE Sau Dan wrote:
[quote]But I'd agree with you that in the main clause, the part before the verb
(which has been moved to the second position as described above) does
serve as a topic.
[/quote]
Topic in the sense of "what we were talking about" as distinct from focus
in the sense of "the news we are goint to tell". I do not think this is
exactly the same distinction as topic vs. comment.
[quote]At least it does so in most situations. (But in
"Gestern wurde getanzt", I'm would not consider "gestern" to be an
emphasized topic.
[/quote]
No, we are already talking (or have just asked) what we did yesterday, and
this is the answer.
[quote]Perhaps, it's better to say "Getanzt wurde gestern"?)
[/quote]
If we are already talking (or have just asked) when we danced, and this is
the answer.
--
Helmut Richter |
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| Joachim Pense... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 10:12 am |
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LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
[quote]"DKleinecke" == DKleinecke <dkleinecke at (no spam) gmail.com> writes:
Das gestern bei Kaufhof gekaufte Waschmachine ist kaputt.
How do you insert "gestern", "bei Kaufhof", etc. into the
equivalent English participle phrase? Is that a phrase, or
just an adjective (derived from a verb)?
DKleinecke> Shouldn't verb second languages be considered as topic
DKleinecke> first languages with verb initial remainders?
I always consider German to be a verb-last language, with the exception
that in the main clause, the stem part (i.e. detached from the separable
prefix) of the inflected verb gets moved to the second position.
But I'd agree with you that in the main clause, the part before the verb
(which has been moved to the second position as described above) does
serve as a topic. At least it does so in most situations. (But in
"Gestern wurde getanzt", I'm would not consider "gestern" to be an
emphasized topic. Perhaps, it's better to say "Getanzt wurde gestern"?)
[/quote]
Gestern wurde getanzt - I would not say "gestern" is an emphasized topic,
but still it's a topic. It answers "what happened yesterday?" and not "Wann
wurde getanzt?" The answer to that would be "getanzt wurde gestern" (this
time indeed with an emphasized topic; without emphasy the topic would be
ommitted along with the verb, leaving "gestern".)
Joachim |
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| Joachim Pense... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 10:19 am |
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LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
[quote]"Joachim" == Joachim Pense <snob at (no spam) pense-mainz.eu> writes:
Joachim> LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
construction to form the noun. In Chinese, you can easily using
the verb as a noun, and you can of course put it at the beginning
of a sentence (or a topic-comment1-comment2-... sequence).
Joachim> I suppose you don't need any additional morpheme to
Joachim> transform a noun into a verb,
Right. How would you otherwise interpret "use the verb as a noun"?
[/quote]
I asked for confirmation just to be sure.
[quote]
Joachim> just put it to the right place in the sentence.
Basically, although for some verb, we would find it better (but not
compulsory) to substitute with another noun.
[/quote]
So you do have in fact a concept of "verb" and "noun" in Chinese?
[quote]That is in consideration
of language habits. (Just like that it is more preferred to say in
English "none of them showed up" than to say "each of them did not show
up".)
Joachim> Do you have topic marker morphemes in Chinese?
Well... no. We don't have compulsory markers like <ga>/<wa> in
Japanese. We do, however, have emphasizing particles that can be used
for marking the topic. Their use is optional, and they're used only
when we want to emphasize the topic.
[/quote]
Do you use sentence melody as (compulsory or optional) topic marker? In
German, you can revert the topic structure of a sentence by that, e.g. in
your examples "gestern wurde getanzt" and "getanzt wurde gestern" you gave
elsewhere the first word is the topic in both cases, exept if the first
word is emphatically stressed; in that case, the first word becomes the
comment in both cases.
Joachim |
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| LEE Sau Dan... |
| Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 10:39 am |
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[quote]"Helmut" == Helmut Richter <hhr-m at (no spam) web.de> writes:
At least it does so in most situations. (But in "Gestern wurde
getanzt", I'm would not consider "gestern" to be an emphasized
topic.
[/quote]
Helmut> No, we are already talking (or have just asked) what we did
Helmut> yesterday, and this is the answer.
Well... If we are already talking about yesterday, I'd omit the
"gestern" and say "Es wurde getanzt." instead.
[quote]Perhaps, it's better to say "Getanzt wurde gestern"?)
[/quote]
Helmut> If we are already talking (or have just asked) when we
Helmut> danced, and this is the answer.
So, "Getanzt" is the topic!
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´° ~{ at (no spam) nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee at (no spam) informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee |
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