Marking up sentence constituents

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How Chinese Grammarians Mark up Sentence Constituents 

句子成分的标识方法

Youxuan Wang

2012-01-23

When analysing the structure of a Chinese sentence, grammarians usually follow the convention of using some markup symbols. They would use underlines, wavy underlines, brackets etc instead of writing down the grammatical terms. They don't have to use words to name a particular type of constituents.

Here is a list of the most commonly used markup symbols.

Using these symbols, we can now mark up the constituents of the sentence "星期天, 我有时在宿舍读书，有时去球场打球" as follows:

Thus,what these brackets and underlines etc. reveal to us is that, in the first clause "我有时在宿舍读书", the adverb "有时" (which is square-bracketed) and the prepositional phrase "在宿舍" (also square-bracketed) as adverbials of time and location, and they serve to bring out a temporal and spatial dimensions in the meaning of the predicate "读"; the pronoun “我” (double-underlined) is the subject of the sentence, and the noun “书” (marked up by a wavy underline) is the direct object of the transitive verb "读" (single-underlined). The second clause omits the pronoun "我" ， which is normal if the subject of the second clause is identical with that of the first clause. The structure of the second clause "(我) 有时 去球场 打球" is different ,as it employs two verb phrases in a serial construction, i.e., “去球场” and “打球”. At the beginning of the entire sentence is the adverbial of time "星期天" (square-bracketed). Since it precedes all the three verbs (i.e., “读”、“去” and “打”) in this sentence, the time which the term "星期天" denotes is the same time when the actions recounted by all the three ensuing verbs take place.

In what follows, you are given examples of a variety of sentence patterns. Please try to translate these sentences into English - as a token that you understand their meaning. (They are all taken from the short allegorical tale that you have already read 《“马虎”背后的血泪故事》 . Click here for a review.) When you think that you understand the meaning of these sentences, please proceed to consider the reasons why various parts of the sentences are marked up the way they are marked up. The ability to do the same is a safeguard of a good intuitive as well as rational sense of Chinese syntax.

Exercises:

Use a pencil to mark up the constituents of the following sentences:

(1)   我  正在  听  音乐。

(2）  我  在厨房  做饭。

(3)   我 每个星期天  给爸爸、妈妈  写信。

(4)   这个  箱子  很  重。 里面  只  有  书。

(5)   现在  是  早晨 九点。

(6)   再过 十个小时， 我们的  工作  就  要  完成 了。

(7)   我  在  跟我的爷爷  学习  太极拳。

(8)   我 喜欢  听  我妈妈  唱歌。

(9)   两座大山  之间  有 一个  很深的  山谷。

(10) 今天下午， 我们学校的 球队  跟  政法大学的  代表队  比赛。
(11) 今天晚上  礼堂  有  舞会。我们  一起  去  跳跳舞  吧。

References:

Wang, Youxuan. "Key concepts and technical terms in Chinese grammar (汉语语法术语)". <http://intensive-chinese.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-max=2012-01-23T07:33:00-08:00&max-results=20&start=4&by-date=false>. 2012-01-22.