Positioning of Modifiers Relative to the Verb

Language Learning Chinese
1

…by “modifiers” I mean the Mandarin equivalent of adjectives/adverbs.

I am having a lot of trouble with this. What I usually see is:

…(verb)…“de” + (modifier)…
e.g. ni3 pao3 de hen3 kuai3 (You run very fast)…

but I am coming across situations where the modifier is used before the verb:

ni3 ti2 zao3 li2 kai1 (You leave / left early)…

I have been looking all over the internet for some kind of rule that governs when to do this. My co-workers (Chinese) seem to think there is no rule, and it is just based on how fluid the resulting sentence would sound after positioning the modifier.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

2

Take a functionalist-by-day’s advice: Think of the semantic roles that they play. For instance, in your sentence:

你提早離開。 ‘提早’ refers to a time period when something is done (“ahead of time”). Is that a general trend? Yes!

e.g.
你明天離開。
你幾點離開？

你跑得很快. It helps me to refer to ‘得’ as a complementizer (“such that”), and those descriptions are usually describing a how an action is being done.

“You run such that it is very fast,” is awkward phrasing to you, but not to them.

English has rules about this stuff, too, but most people don’t know them explicitly. (“I rarely visit my doctor happily,” vs., “I happily visit my doctor rarely,” vs. “I visit my doctor happily rarely. [Huh?]”).

If you want to go about a formal method of investigation, take their usage notes as an indicator for a rule, and try to guess the common features yourself. You end up right more often than you may credit yourself.

3

[quote=“ehophi”]Take a functionalist-by-day’s advice: Think of the semantic roles that they play. For instance, in your sentence:

你提早離開。 ‘提早’ refers to a time period when something is done (“ahead of time”). Is that a general trend? Yes!

e.g.
你明天離開。
你幾點離開？

你跑得很快. It helps me to refer to ‘得’ as a complementizer (“such that”), and those descriptions are usually describing a how an action is being done.

“You run such that it is very fast,” is awkward phrasing to you, but not to them.

English has rules about this stuff, too, but most people don’t know them explicitly. (“I rarely visit my doctor happily,” vs., “I happily visit my doctor rarely,” vs. “I visit my doctor happily rarely. [Huh?]”).

If you want to go about a formal method of investigation, take their usage notes as an indicator for a rule, and try to guess the common features yourself. You end up right more often than you may credit yourself.[/quote]

Thanks a lot. It helps to think of it like that, but i still find “anomalies”. For example, although I know that “ni3 hen3 yong4 gong1” means “You study hard / diligently”, my colleague says that you could also say,:

Ni3 nu3li4 xue2xi2

This puts the “modifier” before the verb, and describes the manner in which it is done. I am starting to think that there is a general rule of where modifiers regarding he likes of manner and time are put, but it is often displaced because of the aesthetically pleasing sound of an alternative placement of the modifier.

4

I think the basic word order rule for verb modifiers (adverbs) and noun modifiers (adjectives) are:

  adverbs + verbs
  adjective + nouns

“Ta hen kuai de pao zou le.” – He quickly ran away.
“Hong ci de hua” – Red flowers.

These are simple kernel sentences.

When you want to be more elaborate and descriptive about how he runs, you can then apply ehophi’s rule using ‘得’ as a complementizer.

“He pao de hen huai” — He is such a good runner.
“Hua kai de hen hong” — Flowers blossom so well this year.

5

When the modifier goes before the verb, the sense is that that quality will help to produce the effect of the verb.
kuai pao! Run right now! Start running quickly!

When it goes after, the sense is that the action of the verb produced the quality in question.
pao de hen kuai - runs fast

Those are general rules. There are always going to be semantic grey areas.

6

[quote=“Reaperjim”][quote=“ehophi”]Take a functionalist-by-day’s advice: Think of the semantic roles that they play. For instance, in your sentence:

你提早離開。 ‘提早’ refers to a time period when something is done (“ahead of time”). Is that a general trend? Yes!

e.g.
你明天離開。
你幾點離開？

你跑得很快. It helps me to refer to ‘得’ as a complementizer (“such that”), and those descriptions are usually describing a how an action is being done.

“You run such that it is very fast,” is awkward phrasing to you, but not to them.

English has rules about this stuff, too, but most people don’t know them explicitly. (“I rarely visit my doctor happily,” vs., “I happily visit my doctor rarely,” vs. “I visit my doctor happily rarely. [Huh?]”).

If you want to go about a formal method of investigation, take their usage notes as an indicator for a rule, and try to guess the common features yourself. You end up right more often than you may credit yourself.[/quote]

Thanks a lot. It helps to think of it like that, but i still find “anomalies”. For example, although I know that “ni3 hen3 yong4 gong1” means “You study hard / diligently”, my colleague says that you could also say,:

Ni3 nu3li4 xue2xi2

This puts the “modifier” before the verb, and describes the manner in which it is done. I am starting to think that there is a general rule of where modifiers regarding he likes of manner and time are put, but it is often displaced because of the aesthetically pleasing sound of an alternative placement of the modifier.[/quote]

I recommend, as above, that you be open to both options being correct for usage until you find a more obvious feature which allows you discriminate them. I worry from your post that you’re looking for a rule at a level of depth that no mere layman requires.

I find that aiming for something which borders a transliteration (putting it together as close to verbatim, word-for-word translation that your lexicon will allow while retaining the translated meaning) is quite helpful.

Source: “你很用功.”
Translit: “You very much use effort.” / (or if you want to treat “用功” as a monadic predicate) “You very diligent.”
Translate: “You are very diligent.” / “You labor very hard.”