Always remember never strand the bu4!

[muckefuck]

It warms my little heart that tales of my Chinese classes have provided inspiration to teapot_farm and nashobabear and I only wish I had the discipline to post more regularly about them. We've really hit our stride this year. As I was telling (a half-awake) monshu last night, I'm always tired afterwards, but it's the good kind of tired, the tired that comes from being activity and engagement rather than frustration and the stress of boredom.

A lot of the credit goes to the new text, which is aimed at college students rather than grade-schoolers. Everything about it is richer and more exhaustive, from the dialogues to the grammatical portions (which were nonexistent before). Last Monday, I had one of those lovely experiences where something utterly puzzling finally falls into place. Transformational grammar came to my rescue!

We were studying types of emphatic constructions with the co-verb lián. It becomes a lot easier to understand when you view it transformationally, as construction that basically yanks an element forward in the sentence in order to emphasise it. Nominal subjects and objects are the most straightforward cases:

Basic sentence: xiǎoháizi rènshì zhèige zì
small-child recognise this-MEASURE character
"A child recognises this character"

Subject emphasised: zhèige zì lián xiǎoháizi dōu rènshì
"Even small children/a small child recognise/s this character." [More literally, "(As for) This character, even small child/ren recognise (it)."]

Object emphasised: xiǎoháizi lián zhèige zì dōu rènshì
"The child/ren recognise/s even this character." ["(As for) Child/ren, even this character (he/they) recognise (it)."]

Clauses, too, were not a problem:
zhèige zhūozi lián tā bān dōu wǒ juéde tàizhòng
"I think this desk is too heavy even for him to move." ["(As for) this desk, even he move (it), I think too heavy."]

It was when applying it to predicates that things got tricky:

zhèiwǎn tāng, lián rè dōu burè, zěnme huì hǎohē
this-bowl soup, even hot all not hot, how can good-drink

We all read this as "This bowl of soup, no matter whether it's hot or not, how can it be tasty [lit. "good to drink"]?" or "Even if it's not hot, how can this bowl of soup be tasty?" But Teacher informed us that wasn't even close. According to her, it meant "If this soup isn't even hot, how can it be tasty?"

It took me a while to spot what was going on. First, let's reconstruct the "untransformed" sentence:

zhèiwǎn tāng bú rè, zěnme huì hǎohē
this-bowl soup not hot, how can good-drink?

[Note that Chinese often doesn't explicitly mark "if...then" statements, so this could be interpreted either as "This (bowl of) soup isn't hot, so how can it be tasty?" or "If this (bowl of) soup isn't even hot, how could it be tasty?" As always, let your context be your guide!]

Now, here's the understanding of the transformation that we had generalised from the other examples:
(1) Place lián after the topic (a grammatical term for the first element, here often translated as "(As for) X").
(2) Move the emphasised element immediately after lián.
(3) Add dōu (or yě; literally "all" and "also", respectively, but here they merely serve to bound the element) immediately after this element.

This should yield:

*zhèiwǎn tāng lián bú rè dōu.

Why doesn't it? I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that (a) lián and bù[*] are both coverbs and (b) bù, as the primary form of negation, has some unique characteristics. Whatever the precise restriction is, *lián bú rè is apparently verboten and only the bare predicate--rè--is allowed to move up behind lián.

But why doesn't this yield:

*zhèiwǎn tāng lián rè bù

I suspect the reason is (b), above, i.e. bù is Not Like Other Co-verbs. Consider its use in interrogatives:

zhèiwǎn tāng rè bu rè "Is this soup hot or not?"

Note the contrast to English: We don't normally repeat the verb/adjective (but compare: "Did you or didn't you eat the soup?".) Even though I can't see how it would be ambiguous, it's not permissible to say:

*zhèiwǎn tāng lián rè bù?

So I figure it's an unbreakable rule of Chinese grammar that bù cannot stand alone. The transformation above pulls the rest of the predicate forward in the sentence. To avoid stranding the bù, we need a rule that instead copies the predicate. It is, in some sense, in two places at the same time: After lián (for emphasis) and after bù (for negation).

As for that explanation, even I can understand it!

[*] The citation form is bù, but it shifts to second tone before another syllable in fourth tone. So búrè but bùhǎo.

Comments

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I was told early on that bu4 is never used alone, even in a short response to a question, though I have heard it used alone that way (but only that way) in everyday speech (admittedly, by a native Mandarin speaker who actually knows far more English than Chinese). I'm told the proper way is always to couple it with a verb, as you state.

"Do you have one?" "Ni2 yao4 yi1ge?"
"Don't have." "Bu2 yao4."

(I'm probably messing up tones.)