Are “Subject+Verb…ma?” and “Subject+Verb bù Verb…?” questions fully interchangeable?

[Sibutlasi]

I am beginning to learn Mandarin and in ALL the grammars/textbooks I have consulted the “….ma/méiyou3?” construction and the “verb bù verb…?”one are presented as alternative ways to ask a yes/no question, but are they fully interchangeable (as such grammars implicitly claim by not adding any further details as to when to use one or the other)?

My intuition tells me they are not, but I may well be dead wrong, and that is why I ask. My reasoning is as follows: IF “[subject]…[VERB]…ma?” means ‘Do(es)[subject]…[VERB]…?’ and "[subject]…[VERB] bu2 [VERB]…?” means ‘Do(es) [subject] [VERB]…OR NOT?’, as a literal translation of the “verb bù verb” part suggests to me, they should NOT be interchangeable. Note that in English, for example, "Do you want to go to Beijing?" is NOT interchangeable with "Do you want to go to Beijing or not?" The former is a neutral yes/no question, but the latter additionally manifests the speaker's impatience with an addressee who has so far been unable to make up his mind and, therefore, is inappropriate out of the blue: it would be impolite to use the “….OR NOT” construction to ask somebody for the first time whether they want to do something. The same distinction applies to the Spanish pair “¿Quieres ir a Pekín?” (neutral) vs. “¿Quieres ir a Pekín o no?” (impatient), and to similar pairs in German, French, Italian, etc. In general, IF the meanings of the two constructions are as assumed, to use the “verb bù verb” option out of the blue would show unjustified impatience towards the addressee; only the “….ma/méiyou3” construction should be acceptable on a first asking.

Of course, I do not know whether my identification of the “verb bù verb” construction with the explicit “OR NOT” of English is justified. Is it? If not, is the Chinese pair of alternatives different in this respect? How would a native speaker react if, as I ask her for the FIRST time whether she wants to go to Beijing with me, I said "ni3 yào bu yào gen1 wo3 qù bei3jing1?" instead of "ni3 yào gen1 wo3 qù bei3jing1 ma"? [ignoring possible mistakes of mine in other, irrelevant, respects] Wouldn’t I sound rude?

IF the two constructions are indeed interchangeable in ALL contexts, then Chinese is ‘redundant’ (please no offence meant!) and exceptional at this point: it has a pair of constructions one of which is completely otiose. If so, the fact would be interesting, because it goes against the ‘economy’ of Language and should NOT happen. Actually, as far as I know, it does not happen. For all would-be such cases, there are contexts in which one construction is possible and the other is not.

[renzhe]

They mean the same thing most of the time, but not always.

The "v不v" construction can have an impatient ring to it, but this depends on the context and tone. It can also be used if you are getting an unclear answer and want to force a yes/no answer. Also, the "v不v" construction is less formal, and there are situations where you would not want to use it (like talking to a boss).

In other contexts (between friends), they are usually exactly the same thing.

If so, the fact would be interesting, because it goes against the ‘economy’ of Language and should NOT happen. Actually, as far as I know, it does not happen.

Perhaps off-topic, but why do you say this? I have no linguistic training, so maybe this is a widely accepted wisdom, but I find this statement quite strange. All languages are full of redundancy, with different ways to say the exact same thing.

I'd also advise caution when translating phrases literally into other languages. All the European languages you listed share a lot of common history, culture, and linguistic material. The "v不v" phrase is exceedingly common in spoken Chinese, while the "... or not" phrase in English (and most European languages) is relatively rare and quite aggressive.

[Shelley]

The use of the two can be very different. For example have you read this book- ni kan zhi shu ma? or have you read books? ni kan bu kan shu? would be better.

I think a specific thing is better with ma and non specific things are better kan bu kan.

It also has a lot to do with the flow and the sound of the language, sometimes it just sounds and feels better to use one over the other. The Chinese language does have a rhythm and sound all its own, the more you listen the more it becomes obvious.

Also ma is a simpler form as it is the same as the answer as it were.so if you have a simple statement you can turn it into a question simply by adding ma, I would think it is quicker and more business like whereas V/bu/V takes a bit of organising. In more complex sentences this may be more confusing.

But I think its uses will become more obvious as you learn more Chinese.

In english the or not form is usually impatience and is not a direct translation in Chinese it is "go, not go". Not "go or not" slightly different but it is why is it feels different.

renzhe makes a lot of good points too.

Experience will make it clearer, sometimes you just have to "have faith" and eventually things will be come clear.

[daofeishi]

For example have you read this book- ni kan zhi shu ma?

That would as far as I can tell be ungrammatical. If you want to ask if the person has read the book, you would use the experiential aspect and ask

你有没有看过这本书?

ni3 you3 mei2 you3 kan4 guo4 zhe4 ben3 shu1?

你看过这本书吗？

ni3 kan4 guo4 zhe4 ben3 shu1 ma?

Note the parallelism between 有没有V过 and V过吗.

[li3wei1]

When I started studying, I was told that the 吗 format implies a degree of disbelief, i.e. that you expect a negative answer, so:

你是老师吗？

would be 'You're not a teacher, are you?', while

你是不是老师？

is a more neutral 'Are you a teacher?'

[realmayo]

I don't want to derail the thread but have a related question, and anyway renzhe's response to the OP rings true to me.

How about ending a question with V+不? Is this incorrect, full-stop? Or a perfectly acceptable colloquial alternative? Regional at all?

[Sibutlasi]

First, thank you all very much for paying attention to my beginner's question. Thanks to you, renzhe, in particular. If I do not misinterpret your reply ("The "v不v" construction can have an impatient ring to it", "...can also be used if you are getting an unclear answer and want to force a yes/no answer..."), it must be concluded that the two constructions are not fully interchangeable, after all. Obviously, it is a matter of co-text (= what has been said before) or, more generally context (including co-text, speech situation, participants' beliefs, shared history, etc.). I also take note of the different degree of formality, and I fully agree (I implicitly said so in my post) that translation is a tricky matter (even within closely related Indoeuropean languages like those I happen to be familiar with). In fact, I cannot yet be sure whether the correspondence "verb bù verb" <> "verb..... or NOT" (an elliptical version of the sentence!) is accurate. If it is not, all my reasoning above collapses.

My remark on the unexpectedness of perfect equivalence between constructions (or perfect synonymy, for that matter) is, indeed, a widely accepted view in linguistics in the last century. To give you a simple example: "I gave Mary my old i-phone" and "I gave my old i-phone to Mary" are usually presented as equivalent. Yet, they are NOT: "I gave Mary my old i-phone" is fine as an answer to the questions "What did you give to Mary?" (with "what" in focus) or "What did you do?" (with "wide focus" = the whole predicate in focus), but inappropriate as an answer to "(To) Whom did you give your old i-phone?" (with "(to) whom" in focus). Conversely, "I gave my old i-phone to Mary" is perfect as an answer to "(To) Whom did you give your old i-phone?" (with indirect object as focus of the question), or "What did you do?" (with the whole predicate in wide focus) but NOT as an answer to "What did you give to Mary?" (with direct object as focus of the question). In this case, as you can see, whether one or the other construction is right depends on the focus of the answer, which must correspond to that of the question (an aspect of the co-text). Similar reasoning makes constructions with and without Passivization, Topicalization, Focalization, tags, ellipsis, etc. in all the languages I'm familiar with NOT fully interchangeable when co-text and context of use are carefully investigated.

Thanks to you, too, li3wei. If what you were taught about "ma" is right, the "ma" question is no longer a "neutral" yes/no question and that entails another potential difference between the two constructions, but, again, one that I have not yet seen described in any of the grammars I am using. Nevertheless, I think I have already encountered quite a few examples in which there is no reason to associate the "ma" variant with a negative polarity expectation (in the hearer's reply). Perhaps native speakers may tell us something more positive in this respect.

[roddy]

How about ending a question with V+不? Is this incorrect, full-stop? Or a perfectly acceptable colloquial alternative? Regional at all?

Linguistically acceptable, but it can be pretty curt and pressing. First time I noticed it was a teacher giving a pupil a telling-off.

[renzhe]

My remark on the unexpectedness of perfect equivalence between constructions (or perfect synonymy, for that matter) is, indeed, a widely accepted view in linguistics in the last century. To give you a simple example: "I gave Mary my old i-phone" and "I gave my old i-phone to Mary" are usually presented as equivalent. Yet, they are NOT

Now you got me interested. I see that you refer to German in a different post.

What's the exact difference between "er hat mich angerufen" and "er rief mich an"?

[realmayo]

I suppose it makes sense. Hi, hello, hi there, hello there, good morning, hey --- these can all mean exactly the same thing and usually do, but not always.

[Sibutlasi]

Thanks, renzhe. In general, the perfect is a present that refers to a completed past event because it is still 'relevant' at speech time, although the latency of relevance is adjusted modulo the scale of the particular events involved and in somewhat different ways, it seems, in different languages (to judge from the time adverbials that Chinese "le" tolerates in comparison with those English "have" or Spanish "haber" do, :-)!). In English (or Spanish), the latency interval that licenses a perfect is small: "I have phoned her today" is fine, but we say "I phoned her yesterday", not "*I have phoned her yesterday"; "I have phoned her this week is also fine" (look at the deictic "this" = the week we are still in), but we say "I phoned her last week", rather than "?I have phoned her last week". So, roughly, the latency value is less than one unit of the time interval involved in each type of event. If the event is 'bigger' and takes more to reach completion, say a change in a country's economy, relevance is computed with respect to a correspondingly bigger interval of time and the perfect remains compatible with adverbials like "this year", "in the last decade", etc. So, "In the last decade our GNP has decreased by twenty per cent" is more natural (to me, anyway, see below) than "In.....decreased by twenty per cent. Note that the perfect does NOT entail that our GNP's decrease continues at speech time, but, whenever it may have happened and stopped (if it did), it was within a time interval that reaches into speech time, it remains latent and 'relevant', and the perfect is possible. Roughly, this is how the distinction works, in German too. So, "Er hat mich angerufen" is likely to occur if the phoning event can be located (by a suitable deictic adverbial like "heute", "diese Woche", etc.) within a time interval that overlaps with speech time, whereas, otherwise, the indefinite past "Er rief mich an" is to be expected, and "Er rief mich am ersten Juli an" is surely better than "?Er hat mich am ersten Juli angerufen" if speech time is now, November 27. Having said so, I must admit that it would be quite a task to identify the "exact" difference between the indefinite past and the perfect and have one's analysis validated by all native speakers of German, because there are regional differences between northern and southern dialects, and many speakers who, even today, do not make a clear distinction between them. This affects all Indoeuropean languages that originally had separate inflected forms for perfect, indefinite past (aorist) and imperfect (Greek, Latin,...). Simplifying a lot, Germanic and Romance have undergone similar developments in this area: mostly illiterate speakers gradually allowed inflections to erode and eventually (late Latin, early Germanic, early Romance) failed to distinguish the different kinds of 'past'. Then, monks and other educated speakers who could read Latin created a new 'analytic' perfect with the help of the auxiliaries "have/haben/haber/avoir...", and "be/sein/ser/être..." which is our current "perfect" [There is an enormous literature on this]. Although, with the near-universal spread of education and school grammar, the new perfect has gradually become part of the common language spoken by all social classes, many speakers still fluctuate in usage. In some countries, including Germany and Spain, there is a very obvious North/South split: the northern areas preserve traces of what was the (Germanic/Romance) speech of illiterate early mediaeval speakers, and one of them is a wider range of use for the indefinite past, whereas in more fully romanized areas the distinction is now radical, or radical among the more literate speakers, because the level of literacy is another obvious factor underlying usage. As a consequence, grammarians must 'idealize' a lot. What they do not usually do is simplify things as much as I have done here, but the topic is simply too big to be adequately dealt with in a post like this (or even in a book, if I could write it!) - which may not deter me from asking people in this forum about the 'latency' of events in Chinese and the adverbials that "le" and 'guò" respectively allow :-)!

[renzhe]

I'll have to disagree on this. The two German sentences are equivalent in terms of meaning, very much unlike English, and the choice is purely stylistic

But to go back to the original post, I think that you are stricter with the requirements for "fully interchangeable" than I am. I am talking about ontological meaning. You could argue that nothing can possibly be "fully interchangeable" because everything carries additional information: prosody, melody, body language, etc. "Aluminium" and "aluminum" are not fully interchangeable (style), although they mean exactly the same thing.

But the two ways to form a question (ma/v+bu+v) are equivalent in terms of basic meaning: they turn a statement into a yes/no question. 你是不是老师? is correctly translated as "Are you a teacher?" Using "or not" is incorrect translation. There are other particles which are different: "ba" can also play this role, but it implies that you're expecting a positive answer, something like adding "...right?" to the sentence.

Stylistically, one of them (ma/bu) might be preferable, but these are subtle differences, which don't change the basic meaning, IMHO.

[imron]

@Sibutlasi, are there any linguistic theories related to the importance of paragraphs?

[陳德聰]

Have you considered applying tests (other than those comparing with other languages) to these two supposedly interchangeable constructions?

1)

Aren't you a teacher?

你不是老师吗?

Nǐ bù shì lǎoshī ma?

2)

*Aren't you a teacher?

你不是不是老师？

Nǐ bù shì bù shì lǎoshī?

Now that I look at that though, it looks like the [ma] is just acting as the missing V in the V不V structure... Not exactly the test I was hoping it would be. But I am struggling to not get a rhetorical reading out of (1), though I can kind of get "You're not a teacher, are you?"...

[anonymoose]

To give you a simple example: "I gave Mary my old i-phone" and "I gave my old i-phone to Mary" are usually presented as equivalent. Yet, they are NOT: "I gave Mary my old i-phone" is fine as an answer to the questions "What did you give to Mary?" (with "what" in focus) or "What did you do?" (with "wide focus" = the whole predicate in focus), but inappropriate as an answer to "(To) Whom did you give your old i-phone?" (with "(to) whom" in focus). Conversely, "I gave my old i-phone to Mary" is perfect as an answer to "(To) Whom did you give your old i-phone?" (with indirect object as focus of the question), or "What did you do?" (with the whole predicate in wide focus) but NOT as an answer to "What did you give to Mary?" (with direct object as focus of the question). In this case, as you can see, whether one or the other construction is right depends on the focus of the answer, which must correspond to that of the question (an aspect of the co-text).

Really? To me it seems both answers are applicable to both questions. If there is any difference, it is just where the stress is.

A: What did you give to Mary?

B: I gave Mary my old i-phone./I gave my old i-phone to Mary

A: (To) Whom did you give your old i-phone?

B: I gave Mary my old i-phone./I gave my old i-phone to Mary.

A: What did you do?

B: I gave Mary my old i-phone./I gave my old i-phone to Mary.

[陳德聰]

The fact that they can both be used to answer all of the questions is a matter of pragmatics and implicature, but they are grammatically different sentences. I can also answer those questions with "I put my old iPhone in Mary's hands and said 'here, have this old iPhone' while caressing her lower back" but this is a more extreme example of how being able to use two different phrases to answer the same question does not automatically make those two sentences equivalent.

Speaking of pragmatics... http://www.icca10.or.../abstract/id/78 may be relevant, suggesting a pragmatic reason a potentially "otiose" structure is still prevalent. And then there's this one http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/fileadmin/material/webfest-for-dieter-gasde/Schaffar.pdf that I don't particularly like so far but willing to go through to see what they're on about.

[realmayo]

but they are grammatically different sentences

What does this actually mean? Of course they are gramatically different! That's the point. The question is whether they're equivalent. Adding stuff about Mary's lower back is absurd.

Two people walk to Mary's house. One walks on the path. The other walks through a bog. They both arrive, which is the important thing. But the way they are received might be different. Might be. If they were guests at Mary's ball, it would probably matter that the bog guy is all wet and messy. But if they are paramedics come to give Mary CPR it's irrelevant. The way that the information travels from you to the person you are talking to -- the option you pick from the grammatical choices available to you in the langage you both speak -- can sometimes be important, but often it isn't. Isn't that right?

I have to admit I find this a funny topic. I'd always thought that if there was one camp that took a serious, earnest, analytical approach to grammar, and another camp that was much more rough & ready, how does it work in the real world kind of attitude, that I'd be in the former camp, but apparently not.

[renzhe]

This is exactly what I mean with "nothing is fully interchangeable" if you go to an extreme. Take these four sentences:

Take this.

Take this!

Take this!!!!

TAKE!!! THIS!!!!!

Do they mean the same thing? Well, obviously, but they are still not fully interchangeable 100% of the time. And it's the SAME sentence. Also take context into account:

Let's play! (winking at a scantily clad person in your bedroom)

Let's play! (holding a chainsaw, approaching a tied up kidnap victim)

They don't mean the same thing at all, and the grammar is exactly the same.

That's why I think that the difference between the two ways to phrase a yes/no question in this thread is vastly exaggerated. Even "play" is not 100% fully interchangeable with "play" if you take the entire co-text and context into account so for me, it's safe to say that "ma" and "v+bu+v" are pretty much the same thing, except in certain contexts I listed.

[陳德聰]

@realmayo

I was just pointing out that simply being able to answer the same question doesn't make them equivalent. If I'm not mistaken, I believe OP was talking about the syntactic structures "V sth. to sb." and "V sb. sth." not being interchangeable, which is way more tangibly demonstrated by using the word "donate" than "give".

@renzhe

Usually when it comes to this kind of question, the only way to get to some sort of answer is by using neutral examples so that things like inflection (TAKE!!! THIS!!!!!) don't get in the way of trying to map features to syntactic structures.

I'd say it's safe to say that if there is a concrete and systematic way in which usage of the two structures differ that they are not interchangeable... I think perhaps using 'equivalent' and 'interchangeable' interchangeably is not particularly useful hehe.

[renzhe]

陳德聰,

I agree, and in that case, I maintain that "...ma" and "v+bu+v" said in exactly the same way in exactly the same situation between exactly the same people (of equal standing) mean exactly the same thing.