Does language "speak" in Chinese?

[Sibutlasi]

As far as I know (but I am a beginner), “shuo1” must take a human subject playing the Agent role, as in a1-2):

a1). ni3 shuo1 shen2me?

a2). ta1 shuo1 ta1 shi4 zhong1guo2ren2

In b), however, accepted as correct, there seems to be no human subject to discharge the role of agent of “shuo1”.

b). zhe4 ge4 dong1xi1 zhong1wen2 zen3me shuo1?

What seems to be playing the subject role in b) is “zhong1wen2”, so that, as far as I can tell, a word-by-word translation of sentence b) into English is “This [thing] Chinese how says?” [or, in idiomatic English = How does Chinese say this (thing)?].

Indeed, in some languages it is possible to construe the language itself, not only its users, as “speaking” (recall Heidegger’s dictum: “Die Sprache spricht, nicht der Mensch”), a figurative use (“prosopopeia” = personification). Is Chinese one of such languages? Do Chinese speakers feel b) as a "figurative" use of language or not?

I wrote “seems to be” above (instead of “is”) because, under certain theories of language, sentence b) could be reconciled with the rules of grammar without invoking personification: “shuo1” might be claimed to have a hidden impersonal human subject and Agent (an unpronounced pronominal “pro” roughly equivalent to “one”, “you”, “people”,…). In that case, however, “zhong1wen2” would have to be interpreted as a figurative place modifier (= “in Chinese”) and some more hidden structure would have to be assumed (an unpronounced preposition similar to “in”, perhaps “yong4”). Those are the two analyses that seem to me possible; perhaps there are others…. Are there?

Under ANY of those two analyses, however, the object of "shuo4" - that is, “zhe4 ge4 dong1xi1”- must be the Topic (and in Topic position) in b), and, Topicalization being an optional strategy, example c) should be possible as an alternative version of b), that is, one in which, simply, the object is NOT topicalized, but left in its canonical place. However, is c) correct?

c). zhong1wen2 zen3me shuo1 zhe4 ge4 dong1xi1?

If it is not, a further issue arises: Why not? The only reason that occurs to me is that in example c) “shuo1” violates the preferred (“trochaic”) rhythmic pattern of Chinese (c = /Xx-Xx-X*_-Xx-Xx/), but many acceptable sentences fail to comply with the preferred rhythmic pattern, after all, so I hope somebody here can also enlighten me as regards the acceptability status of c) and the reason why it is acceptable or not.

Edited November 26, 2012 at 05:36 PM by roddy
Please stick to default fonts, thanks

[renzhe]

The sentence b) is fine for informal usage, but you should see it as a contraction.

It can be expanded to "zhe4 ge4 dong1xi1 (yong4) zhong1wen2 zen3me shuo1?", where "yong4" means "use". "yong4 zhong1wen2" describes the manner in which something is said, it is not the subject, and neither is dongxi.

The subject is left out, as is commonly done in Chinese. The subject is a person, but it is dropped because it is not important who says it, but how it is generally said. You could also say "zhe4 ge4 dong1xi1 yong4 zhong1wen2 ni3 zen3me shuo1?", in which case you are stressing the subject "how would you say this in Chinese".

In spoken Chinese, this is very common. sometimes you drop a duplicated verb, sometimes you drop the shi4 (是) in a shi...de (是。。。的) construction, and many other things. A lot of confusion stems from dropping things where they are implied and obvious to native speakers.

C) is wrong, because you can't drop the "yong4". You can, however, say "yong4 zhong1wen2 zen3me shuo1 zhe4 ge4 dong1xi1?"

[daofeishi]

The sentence should be parsed as "this thing in Chinese how to say?", not "this thing Chinese how says". Chinese is not the subject of the verb, it is a verbal attribute, and really comes from "zhe4 ge dong1xi yong4 zhong1 wen2 zen3me shuo" where the yong4 has been dropped. The subject pronoun has also been dropped, which also happens a lot in Chinese. The general "you" is implied.

[Michaelyus]

Actually, I dare say that a phrase like the one below would be considered grammatical, albeit quite colloquial:

英语这个怎么说？

Even though the word for the language has been moved to the front, the 用 can still remain implied; it doesn't have to be explicit when the object of 用 has been fronted. Is it because of Mandarin's preference for trochees? Might there be an interaction between monosyllabic verb and trochaic rhythm with respect to sentence position (the whole "monosyllabic verbs are most tolerated at the ends of utterances" rule-of-thumb, which reminds one of poetic catalexis)? I'll let someone else crunch the corpora for that; in any case, even though 用 is usually used in that kind of sentence, it doesn't have to be.

[Sibutlasi]

Thank you all for your answers. Thank you, especiall,y again, renzhe. It follows from your answer that b) is perfectly in tune with the grammar provided the relatively sophisticated hidden structure (unpronounced general pronominal, deleted "yong4") that I suspected might exist is in fact assumed. Of course, pro-drop and verb/preposition deletion does not put me off, :-). Your judgment as regards c) of course follows if "zhong1wen2" cannot be a subject of "shuo1" anyway. I take it, however, that personification (in other cases) is as available in Chinese as it is in other languages.

Thank you, too, daofeishi. Of course, I only added tense to my translation to make it idiomatic English, and under the (wrong) expectation that "Chinese" might be the subject (as it seemed, in the absence of "yòng"). Note, however, that your own translation is also unfaithful to Chinese in a different way: Chinese has no infinitive :-). But, from the perspective of an English speaker, you are right to choose "to say", of course: in English the (apparently) subjectless infinitive automatically triggers the generic 'impersonal' subject interpretation because any explicit subject (cf. "*You/Paul/him/people to say so") is excluded unless the infinitive is embedded and follows "for", "with" or a verb. On the contrary, any tensed form requires an explicit nominative subject and those do not allow an 'impersonal' interpretation unless "you", "one" or "people" are chosen.

Finally, thank you very much Michaelyus for your interesting example and the attending considerations on the possible connection between the need to satisfy trochaic rhythm and the optional deletion of "yòng". Although Chinese allows multiple topic slots (or fronted adverbial plus topic), what it does NOT allow (as far as I know!) is leftwards "gapping" (a non-surprising fact in a SVO language). It follows that pure syntactic deletion is out of the question in your example. However, if the [phonetic] deletion of "yòng" is indeed optional, as follows from your and renzhe's complementary examples, doesn´t the version WITHOUT deletion violate trochaic rhythm? My intuition tells me that "Yòng Yīngyǔ zhège zěnme shuō" should sound X*_- Xx - Xx - Xx - X(*)_. Am I wrong?

[realmayo]

Chinese often doesn't bother with pronouns. Isn't it as simple as that? It's not shuo-specific.

Beijing zenme qu? Beijing isn't qu-ing anywhere.

Zenme ban?!

[Michaelyus]

用 is most definitely not stressed in that sentence (even in an imperative, I'd want to stress the 英 more than the 用), so you'd form an acephalic first foot (or you can analyse it as an amphibrachic first foot with 英语). Amphibrachs and dactyls are all fair game: best tolerated at boundaries (beginnings and ends), and with semantic reinforcement (parallelism makes everything more acceptable in prosody!).

[imron]

Zenme ban?!

Mei banfa. Jiu zhe yang.