9 Lesson 8- 兩頭蛇

Grammar Note 7

In Grammar Note 4 we glanced at the question of sentences that end in 也 yě. The readings through Lesson 7 contain five of these sentences, and there are three more in lesson 8. Let’s review the first five:

A Chinese term for sentences that end in 也 yě  is 判斷句 pàn duàn jù “judgmental (or conclusion-drawing) sentence”.  We may distinguish between such judgmental sentences and the more numerous narrative sentences which cannot take a final也 yě  (although, unlike judgmental sentences, they can take a final 矣 yǐ ).  As Shadick observed, what we are calling judgmental sentences “are always concerned with judgments, opinions and attitudes regarding facts,” in contrast to narrative sentences, which concern the succession of events in time (cited in Grammar Note 4). In the judgmental sentences above, numbers 1-4 seem to judge character or motive while number 5 morally judges an act.

Another distinction can be drawn between verbal and nominal sentences. Verbal sentences – most of the sentences we’ve seen so far in Classical Chinese, and all full English sentences – have a nominal subject and verbal predicate, that is, a predicate with a verb as its irreducible core. Nominal sentences have a nominal subject and nominal predicate; any underlying verbal construction in the predicate is nominalized, either by an ” empty word,” such as 無 wú 其 qí 之 zhī 者 zhě, or implicitly.

All narrative and some judgmental sentences (such as 1-3 above) are verbal.  Many judgmental sentences state equations, either as an identity, like “Cilantro is coriander,” or a class membership, like “Cilantro is an herb.”  But while English sentences rely on the verb “to be” as a link or “copula” between the noun subject and noun complement, the equational or nominal sentences in Classical Chinese simply juxtapose two noun phrases, one subject and one predicate, often (not always) followed by也 yě (but never by 矣 yǐ).

Sentences 4 and 5 are not the most obvious examples of nominal sentences, but we’ll have to work with them since they are our only examples so far, and sentence 5 belongs to an important type. The nominal character of the predicates in sentences 4-5 is not obvious because the verbs in them are not explicitly nominalized, but we can still demonstrate the nominal character of these predicates and show how the nominalization of verbs in them could be made explicit.

Verbal and nominal sentences differ not only in the declarative but also in the interrogative particles which may terminate them, and in the verb for’ like’ which they may contain, this in verbal sentences being 如 rú or 若 ruò and in nominal sentences 猶 yóu. Sentence 4 is nominal because it contains 猶 yóu. We can make its nominal character explicit by the following expansion:

Sentence 5, or rather the latter part of it, identifies itself as nominal because it belongs to a well-recognized type in which an initial element, which can be itself a verbal sentence, is resumed by a word of nominal value meaning “this” (usually 是 shì or 此 cǐ), which stands as subject taking a nominal predicate (compare  “To be or not to be, that is a question”). Sentence 5 can be expanded thus to make clear the nominalization:

A well known passage of parallel construction is:

[When you] know it, to recognize that [you] know it [and] [when you] don’t know to recognize that [you] don’t know, this is knowledge / wisdom.  (Analects, 2.17)

Definitions and other identifications naturally take the form of an equational (nominal) sentence, and will be much more in evidence when you take up philosophical texts or start reading footnotes and dictionary entries in Classical Chinese. You’ll find that the subject in these sentences often terminates in the particle 者 zhě followed by a pause less marked than the pause between sentences.

Some examples: