sentence structure with adverbs

[Peppermind]

Hi there,

 

using spoonfed deck on anki i came upon the sentence: 我的学上学东西快。 But why is 快 not before 学？

I thought adverbs should always be positioned  before the verb they modifie .

thank you :)

[roddy]

Should that be 学生 and not 学上？

[Peppermind]

You are right , correct sentence should be : 

我的学生学东西快

[889]

I am no grammarian so I can't tell you why.

 

But I can tell you that while it's 快告诉我！it's 别说那么快！

[roddy]

After considerable and annoying thought, I don't know. The best I can come up with is that it's a complement of degree, with both 得 and the repetition of the verb omitted. See 6. So a fuller version would be 我的学生学东西学得快. I am not happy with this explanation.

[889]

As I said, I know nothing about formal Chinese grammar, but I just took a look at my old copy of 《外国人实用汉语语法》. It does indeed say that an "adverb" precedes the verb, but it treats words like 快 and 慢 "describing the state of a movement or action" as "adjectives". When they precede a verb, it says, they are "adverbial adjuncts." But not "adverbs", apparently. So perhaps 快 and 慢 and company form a special class.

 

There's no doubt some danger in assuming "adverb" takes the same meaning in both English and Chinese.

[HuoXing]

On 1/24/2020 at 2:27 PM, Peppermind said:

我的学生学东西快

As a new beginner in the study of Chinese, I am out of my depth here. Please bear with me. I just thought perhaps the sentence can be analyzed as follows:

 

我的学生= topic

学东西 (learning things)= subject (kind of "substantivated" verb phrase therfore considered as a noun phrase)

快= (adjectival) predicate

[davoosh]

I agree more or less with HuoXing. I think it's a kind of topic-comment situation but I also don't think it's easy or always possible to apply more European-style grammatical functions such as rigid definitions of adverb, substantive, etc. I find Chinese grammar to be heavily context dependent, in ways which might not be obvious if over-relying on grammatical distinctions in European languages.

 

See also:

 

你說話很快： 你說話 = topic, 很快 = comment.

他唱歌不好聽： 他唱歌 = topic, 不好聽 = comment

 

You could think of it as: 'As for my student's studying, it's fast' or 'My student studies (and it's) fast'

 

Similarly: As for your speaking, it's fast ('You speak (and) it's fast). Or,  As for his singing, it doesn't sound nice (He sings (and) it's not nice).

 

Of course these can also be rephrased: 他話說得快， 他歌唱得不好聽 but I feel like there is a slightly different nuance from the above sentences, although my Chinese isn't good enough to describe what the nuance would imply...
 

Topic-Comment is generally a very prevalent sentence structure in Chinese, which is why you also see things like:

他鼻子很長 'His nose is long' (i.e. as for him, the nose is long) rather than 他的鼻子很長 and

咖啡（我）喝完了 'I drank all the coffee' (i.e. as for the coffee, I drank it all) 

 

 

[Messidor]

    If 快 is placed before the verb 学, the structure has two common functions: imperative and narrative (past).

    1a) 快看书，别玩游戏了！[1]
    1b) 他很快地学完了今天的课程。

    2) 我的学生学东西快。

    (2) is a sentence stating a fact (a state), so it's neither imperative nor narrative-past [2]. Therefore the native way to construct a sentence is to postposition 快, ie. VP-de-快, which was exemplified in daoosh's comment. 
    However, example (2) is (likely) structurally different from VP-de-快, which is made obvious by the absence of complement marker 得(de). Compare the examples below:

    3a) 他学东西(很)快。
    3b) 他语速(很)快。[3]
    3c) 饭很好吃。
    3d) 他学东西学得(很)快。
    3e) 他学得快。

    Apparently, (3a) is structurally identical to (3b), but not (3d); while (3d) shares with (3e) the same structure VP-de-快, which is absent in (3a-b). In both (3d) and (3e), the verb 学 before 得 is undoubtedly the main verb of the sentence. Although people may translate (3a) into "he learns fast", where "fast" is a adv (like "happily), in the original Chinese sentence 快 is functionally identical to 好吃 in (3c) -- here in (3c) 好吃 can never be taken as a adv. 
    If we accept that 快 in (3a) is an adjective, then what is the NP in (3a-b) (as 饭 in (3c))? In (3b) We have two options: 他 and 语速, both of which are NP. Here comes the tricky thing: in Mandarin, one of the NPs is treated as TOPIC, and the other NP the SUBJECT/OBJECT. Therefore we have to treat the left one, 他, as the topic and 语速 the subject. In the same vein we take 他 in (3a) as the topic and the whole VP 学东西 the subject. This is Huoxing's stance.
    So far, we have obtained a sound answer to the question why is 快 not before 学. We can't place 快 before 学 because this structure occupies a different functional niche.
    Finally, there are two problems left unsolved in this stance. The 1st one is: can the VP be the subject? Or, can we treat the VP as NP as Huoxing suggested?
    Treating the VP as NP sounds economic (and friendlier to many native speakers of inflectional languages), but it will jeopardize the topic-subject stance since we can't explain the reduplication of the verb in (3d). The second verb -- the main verb of the sentence in (3d) -- is the reduplicated version of the preceding one embedded in the VP 学东西. Therefore the verb in 学东西, according to our intuition and common sense, should also be the verb so as to lend itself to reduplication. The only choice we have is to treat 学 in the VP 学东西 as a verb while still treating the whole VP 学东西 as a subject. The question arises here is whether a VP can function as a subject in Mandarin, and the answer is yes it can [4]. However, we may encounter a counterargument here: the second verb in a sentence is not necessarily the reduplication of the first one, since we can also say perfectly acceptable sentences like:

    4) 他吃饭嚼得很慢.

    Since 嚼 is not a reduplication of 吃, why should the second 学 in (3d) be? 
    A supporter of reduplication may argue that, the VP 吃饭 in (4) is closer to NP than the VP in (3d), or put it another way, 吃饭 is more like a single word (of two syllables) -- though it's still clearly analytical -- whereas 学东西 is more like a phrase consists of a verb and a noun, therefore such morphological difference may licence the other verb choices after 吃饭 while at the same time largely block alternation of verb after VP 学东西.
    Trivial as such debate sounds, it has an implication for the second problem. The second problem is that we may hypothesize that (3a) is the elliptical version of (3d), a hypothesis both powerful and elegant. According to this hypothesis, when the juxtaposed two verbs are identical, it's reduplication; when it's reduplication, ellipsis comes into play. When the two verbs are different, there is no reduplication, thus no ellipsis. Accordingly, (3d) can bear (3a), while (4) can't bear the sentence “他吃饭很慢” since the meanings of the two sentences are obviously different. 
    If this hypothesis is true, then we will cast doubt on the topic-subject stance, as the word 快 in (3a), according to this hypothesis, is identical both semantically and functionally to the 快 in (3d). Before identify the components in (3a), we must first identify the syntactical components in (3d), which is notoriously difficult. Is 他 still the topic, 学东西 the subject, 学 the main verb and 得很快 the complement? Obviously the verb 学 is directly oriented at  他 rather than the alleged subject 学东西. If 学东西 is not a subject, then how can the same phrase in the elliptical version, ie. (3a), be the subject? According to our scientific common sense, there should be a unified explanation for all the interrelated questions and for the anti-ellipsis stance (or other stances).
    One more word, "other stances" here refers to the stances which posit that sentences like (3a) and (3d) are generated in the same manner, which is contrary to the stance that, using Chomskian argots, the two kinds of sentences are generated from two different deep structures.

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[1] In fact 快 in (1a) doesn't means "fast". It has a meaning similar to "hurry up" or "immediately".
[2] Note, however, that quite a few other adverbs can be placed before the verb to denote a state, habitual behavior, etc. eg. 他常常...，他只知道.... Also note here that the state verb 知道 is different from the activity verb 学, and that 快 (adj&adv) is different from the pure adv 只.
[3] I personally would not omit 很 in this sentence when there is no sentence final particle (SFP) in the sentence; otherwise it sounds incomplete (ie. excerpted from a conversation or a longer sentence) or unnatural to me. Nonetheless people find it hard to categorize the sentence ungrammatical even when 很 is left out.

[Hagai]

Well, just a beginner here, but I thought of simpler structure:

我的学生 = attributive

学东西 = subject

快 = predicate

I'm probably wrong, but would like to be corrected.