Position of 面熟 in this sentence

Question

In my textbook I found this sentence:

常常看着一个人面熟却叫不出名字来。

1. If 面熟 is an adjective, why is it used after 人 (to indicate a "familiar-looking person")?
2. Can 一个人面熟 be rewritten to 一个面熟人 without modifying the sentence's original meaning?

Answer 1

This is a classic example of a topic-comment construction that is prevalent in Chinese. In this case, 面熟 is not serving as an adjective to the noun, but rather as a comment on the topic.

• 常常看着一个人 ("often seeing a person") is the topic
• 面熟却叫不出名字来 ("[he's] familiar, yet [I] can't come up with [his] name") is the comment.

All adjectives in Chinese can function as verbs (Chinese adjectives are sometimes called stative verbs for this reason); as such, they can function as a predicate by themselves. Because Chinese is a pro-drop language, predicates can serve as their own clauses in a comment.

To answer your second question, you can't put 面熟 before the noun in this case without restructuring the sentence. 却 is used to connect two clauses together. If you make 面熟 into an adjective, it's no longer a clause, so the usage of 却 will no longer make sense.

Answer 2

In my opinion, here “面熟" is the complement to the clause "常常看着一个人". That's why it is used after "一个人" though it's really an adjectvie. In English, you would see similiar consctructions:

He makes me angry.
I found her so beautiful.
He is coming here with the final decision in his mind.
I saw a man apparently faimilar to me yesterday, but I could't recall who he is.

For your second question, you could put "面熟“ before "一个人" to modify it, but generally we use "面熟的", or it sounds strange. You could say,

常常看着一个面熟的人却叫不出名字来。

A little reminder:

In Chinese, the elements of sentences include:主语(Subject),谓语(Predicate),宾语(Object),定语(Attributive), 状语(Adverbial) and 补语(Complement). You may want to understand what they are and how to use them first, before you could analyze the sentence structures.

Answer 3

If you look at 面熟 and it's meaning 面 = appeared / appearance 熟 = familiar

The sentence in English reads more like this: "I saw a person who appeared familiar (to me)"

In Chinese this seems a bit strange, but this is a common construct. See this example:

我看到一个人胡子长长的

Maybe this reads better with a comma:

我看到一个人, 胡子长长的

Which you will notice if you search Google for "一个人面熟" there are quite a few examples of:

... 一个人, 面熟

You can also put the characters in front but you need to use the possessive 的 as in:

看到好面熟的一个人

Which a good counter example in English to the sentence I provided above is more like:

"I saw a very familiar looking person"