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tā He 打 dǎ hit 人。 rén person 他 打 人。 tā dǎ rén He hit person He hits someone. Chinese can also be considered a topic-prominent language: there is a strong preference for sentences that begin with the topic, usually "given" or "old" information; and end with the comment, or "new" information. Certain modifications of the basic subject–verb–object order are permissible and ...
Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping, and the related subject dropping. Although the ...
noun used as adverbial: 犬坐於前 quǎn zuò yú qián; lit: "(a wolf) dog sit in the front", actually means: "(a wolf) is sitting in the front like a dog" verb used as noun (rare case): 乘奔御風 chéng bēn yùfēng; lit: "ride gallop or wind", actually means: "ride a galloping horse or wind"
Chinese is a strongly analytic language, having almost no inflectional morphemes, and relying on word order and particles to express relationships between the parts of a sentence. [91] Nouns are not marked for case and rarely marked for number. [92] Verbs are not marked for agreement or grammatical tense, but aspect is marked using post-verbal ...
All Chinese classifiers generally have the same usage, but different nouns use different measure words in different situations. ie: 人(rén; person) generally uses 個(gè), but uses 位(wèi) for polite situations, 班(bān) for groups of people, and 輩(bèi) for generations of people, while 花(huā; flower) uses 支(zhī) for stalks of ...
The term "pre-Classical Chinese" is used to distinguish this earlier form from Classical Chinese proper, as it did not inspire later imitation to a comparable degree despite the works' equal importance in the canon. [3] After the Han dynasty, the divergence of spoken language from the literary form became increasingly apparent.
In syntax, Classical Chinese words are not restrictively categorized into parts of speech: nouns used as verbs, adjectives used as nouns, and so on. There is no copula in Classical Chinese; 是 (shì) is a copula in modern Chinese but in old Chinese it was originally a near demonstrative ('this'), the modern Chinese equivalent of which is 這 ...
The dictionary lists other specialized grammatical categories, [16] for instance, "auxiliary nouns proper" and "quasi-auxiliary nouns", and introduces for the first time in a Chinese dictionary "many new ideas about the linguistic structure of Chinese, such as the four types of verbal complements": the "pre-transitive," "verb-object ...