What does 头 in 搞得头 / 弄得头 / 睡过头
For example in this sentence: 可是这个密码那个密码,搞得头都大了。
“头” 是 head的意思? “头” 字是个结果补语还是名词?
Chinese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Chinese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityTo extend the answer from @r13:
These two following '头' refer to 'a person's head': 搞(弄)得头都大了 - something causes my head swollen(meaning you are headache). 搞(弄)得头都暈了 - something causes my head dizziness/confusion.
In last case, 头 is not 'head': There are several dialects call '小时-hour(Mandarin)' as '钟头' or '中午-noon' as '中午头', but they will be commonly understood by most of Chinese. I'm not sure 'hour' or 'noon' which one exactly referring to, just remember it's related to time. So, 睡过头 - means 'sleep pass the hour' or 'sleep pass the noon', oversleep
搞(弄)得头都大了 - something causes headache.
搞(弄)得头都暈了 - something causes dizziness/confusion.
睡过头 - overslept
There are two things happening here. In your example, 可是这个密码那个密码,搞得头都大了, the second half should be parsed as: (搞得)+(头都大了).
It's the same for 弄; see the examples in r13's answer.
Basically, 搞得头 and 弄得头 are not a single grammatical entity.
"头都大了" is an interesting phrase that's worth looking at. I find it a bit hard to translate, my best attempt is "already has a headache". As far as I understand (I may be wrong), it is derived from a) "头大" which is a dialectal word (方言) according to dictionaries; and b) the structure " 都 + predicate + 了 = 已经 + predicate = already + predicate".
"头都暈了", mentioned in other answers, follows the same pattern. ("already dizzy")
The second case is 睡过头 which is a fixed expression that is in dictionaries and means to oversleep.