Re: Stative verbs. Was: i am sleeping / i am asleep

On 03/14/06 03:54 am Wayne Brown wrote:

The only other place I've come across the concept of "stative verbs" is when I was studying Mandarin Chinese. E.g., we were taught that the equivalent of the English "He is tall" (Subject, verb, complement) is "Ta gau" (subject, stative verb meaning "is tall").
[...]

And now that I have thought about it more, I realize that if I consider the Mandarin equivalent of your first example, the verb "own", this is not a stative verb according to what I was taught: "He/she owns/has a house" = "Ta you (yi-ge) fang-dz" (Subject, non-stative verb, numeral [optional if there's only one], object).

Some teachers of Chinese apparently have taught their students that 高 (gāo, tall) can mean "is tall" as in "他很高" (tā hěn gāo, he's tall) to help speakers of English get accustomed to the fact that the Chinese verb for "to be" (是, shì) is not used in such cases. "Tall" in your example is not a stative verb; it's a stative adjective. It's not helpful, in my opinion, to offer explanations to students of Chinese like "is tall." It's better to explain, I believe, that Chinese does not use a copular verb, as English does, to join an predicative adjective to the subject. Admittedly, Chinese likes to use the adverb "很" (hěn, very) in front of "tall" in such a short sentence in which the adverb often isn't translated because it's simply inserted to comply with Chinese ideas of symmetry and balance in Chinese sentences -- something that Westerners need time to get the knack of. By the way, Chinese is by no means alone in not using a copular verb here. In Russian, f
or example, it's not used in the singular, "она красивая" (ona krasivaya), meaning "she is beautiful," without the lightest loss.

Thanks for your comments.

The texts we used were no doubt (over-)simplified by comparison with the materials that a professional linguist would use. But if 高 (gāo, tall) is really an adjective, that conflicts with another thing we were taught, i.e., that these (putative) "stative verbs" can be used as adjectives by appending -de (sorry: although I was able to cut and paste the characters and letters with diacritics from your message, I cannot -- or cannot figure out how to -- compose them on this computer). How do we explain in more technical terms that if the adjective precedes the noun we have to add the -de? Is it just a matter of whether it's used attributively or predicatively (using the terms I learned when studying Greek -- but again these may not be the strict linguistic terms)?

In the second example, he owns/has a house, it's possible to express exactly the same ideas in Chinese with "他拥有一所房子" (tā yōngyǒu yī suǒ fángzi) for "owns" and "他有一所房子" (tā yǒu yī suǒ fángzi) for "has." Using the common classifier "个" (ge) is not too hot an idea in this case. Classifiers with houses and buildings like "所" (suǒ) and "间" (jiān) are more elegant. You'll hear older Chinese complain that young people today don't take as much care with correct classifiers as the older generation does. Where have I heard that before?

OK. I knew that, but I'm out of practice. Our teachers called them "measure words" and were rather particular about using the appropriate ones -- although I seem to recall learning "dong" as the measure word for houses.

Somewhere I still have a couple of more technical Chinese grammars into which I have dipped occasionally, but we did not use them in class. At present I cannot find them; perhaps they are still in a box that has not yet been opened.

Perce
.

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