Timeline for Why is 面熟 used after 人 in 常常看着一个人面熟却叫不出名字来?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
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| Jan 14, 2012 at 0:22 | comment | added | Bathrobe | In fact, I find this sentence quite interesting because it embodies one aspect of Chinese that I've noticed but find hard to pin down, i.e., sentences that contain what might be called 'hybrid structures'. They make perfect sense but it's not clear how to analyse them cleanly. In this case, it's the overlapping of a simple concatenation of sentences (e.g., 常常看着一个人，他认识你，你不认识他) and the topic-comment structure (人面熟却叫不出名字来). Please don't ask me for other examples because I can't give you any, but this kind of phenomenon seems somehow very familiar in Chinese. | |
| Jan 13, 2012 at 23:12 | comment | added | Bathrobe | I'm in two minds about the topic-comment analysis. The Wikipedia article gives only nominal topics, which can be seen as a result of 'topicalisation'. This seems rather different. Can the concept of topic be extended to an entire sentence (常常看着一个人)? (In English, this kind of meaning could be expressed colloquially as: 'You often see someone where you can remember the face but not the name'.) While the Chinese could be written 常常看着一个人，面熟却叫不出名字来, this obscures the fact that 人面熟 does form a natural unit in Chinese, precisely in the topic-comment construction that you mention. | |
| Jan 13, 2012 at 14:45 | vote | accept | dusan | ||
| Jan 13, 2012 at 8:59 | comment | added | Alenanno | "All adjectives in Chinese can function as verbs" — Really? That's something interesting to know... +1 for that :D | |
| Jan 13, 2012 at 5:04 | history | edited | Claw | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
And another one... was I asleep while writing this? :-P
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| Jan 13, 2012 at 3:21 | history | edited | Claw | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Copy-pasted the wrong characters before
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| Jan 13, 2012 at 3:03 | comment | added | Alf | +1 for mentioning topic-comment construction, which is really the ur-structure for most Chinese sentences. | |
| Jan 13, 2012 at 2:52 | history | edited | Claw | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Left off a character by accident
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| Jan 13, 2012 at 2:43 | history | edited | Claw | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Clarified answer with more information and answered second question.
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| Jan 13, 2012 at 2:36 | history | answered | Claw | CC BY-SA 3.0 |