I was practicing Chinese dictation with Google Translate and tried to speak this sentence, meaning “You sent him some apples.”
你給他送了幾個蘋果
But Google always recognized it as a question, “You sent him how many apples?”
你給他送了幾個蘋果?
In this sentence, is it correct that the only difference between the statement and the question is the tone, or lack thereof, on 幾個? Can the statement be clarified with some other contextual cues to indicate that 幾個 is not a question?
幾棵
Thanks – that’s very interesting, as I didn’t know that word. If I use 幾棵 when dictating to Google Translate, it properly gets translated as a statement.
But conversely, even if I really stress the third tone of 幾 when speaking 幾棵, it never gets recognized as a question word. So Google 老師 seems to think that 幾棵 is always a statement word (“a few”) rather than a question word (“how many?”). Is that in fact the case for the common usage of 幾棵?
Who put it this way?
Shouldn’t it be:
你送給他幾顆蘋果？
That was just my learner’s attempt at cobbling together words and phrases that I learned from different chapters in the textbook. Thanks for the correction.
But hang on a second, is there no 了 needed in your version to indicate past tense?
The problem with the 你送給他幾顆蘋果 construction is that it is ambiguous whether you meant it as a statement or question. I noticed textbooks for foreign students love to throw stuff like this in there, which at least people in Taiwan almost never use this construction as a statement anymore. If I read this as a statement, my mind is placing the speaker in 1920s China.
I would say “you sent him some apples” as 你有送過幾顆蘋果給他了喔
First of all, it is weird to recount something the listener did as a statement, since the listener knows best what they did or didn’t do. So 喔 is almost always needed, at least in conversation, to show that it is an acknowledgement to being told “我有送幾個蘋果給他了”
I know the 有 + verb is a very Taigi influenced usage, but I’m sorry, it’s just just clearer than whatever Mandarin they speak in China.
Would it be ok to say
你有送給他一些蘋果
To clarify a statement rather than a question?
Now this is getting interesting. So it seems that 幾顆 or 幾個 combined with 喔 always makes it a statement requesting acknowledgement (as tested with Google 老師). My textbook made no mention of this (yet) and instead claimed that it was the tone, or lack thereof, on the 幾 that made the difference. But the tone may be hard to discriminate, while the presence of 喔 would seem to be the easiest way to disambiguate the meaning of 喔 – even without using the 有 + verb as you also suggest.
So is a mere 喔 enough to signal that 幾 is a statement indicating a few, rather than question word?
(Edit: whoops, I misread 喔 as 吧, but the idea seems the same – the final marker seems to disambiguate the intent of the sentence and hence the intent of the 幾.)
Le does not indicate past tense. Thinking of it this way leads to bad habits that are hard to change later.
I have also heard that Taigi influenced Mandarin abuses sentence finals, such as 喔, 吧, 啊, 呀, 啦 or whatever. I think it’s just an essential part of Sinitic languages from the start. It’s the same as 呼, 罷, 矣, 也, 邪 and other older attested usage that essentially served the same functions as their similar sounding modern counterparts.
If this is a question, I can see 啊 there, especially if the person who asks is surprised.
哇, 你有送過幾顆蘋果給他啊! 100顆! 我的媽啊!
Yes. Although 吧 can be a bit ambiguous as well. It can be used as a statement to double confirm that a previously agreed upon action has been completed. For example, the day before you and the listener talked about giving some apples to the other person, and you are just following up to see if the other person received his apples.
你送幾顆蘋果給他了吧。
I am not sure if it isn’t also a question, like a declarative question?
吧 can also implying it was something that shouldn’t be done. For example, if you asked the listener not to give any apples to the other person, and you suspect the listener did anyway, and you can say
你送幾顆蘋果給他了吧。
I guess that’s also a declarative question.
In spoken language, what differentiates these two usage for me is how high or low you set the pitch for 你. 你 for the double checking usage starts at a higher pitch, and 你 in the blaming usage starts at a lower pitch.
I would add a 還是 in that case
你還是送幾顆蘋果給他了吧。
[I told you not to, but I know you could not help yourself and did it anyway]
Or I would say
你不會送幾顆蘋果給他了吧。
if you suspect apple deliverance, but are not quite sure
At the risk of stretching an analogy too far, this kind of reminds me of usage of “didn’t you?” in English:
“You gave him some apples, didn’t you?” (higher, rising, questioning pitch on “didn’t you” to confirm that the expected action was indeed carried out.)
“You gave him some apples, DIDN’T you?” (lower, blaming, declarative pitch on “didn’t you”, as if to precede something like “and that’s why we have so few apples remaining.”)
As for the pitch on 你, I could try to rationalize the pitch change such that high-pitched 你 just means “you” neutrally, where as low-pitched 你 might be spoken in a low tone like the drawn-out “you” in “you (lying piece of scum)”.
Another 你 pitch that I’ve heard on Taiwanese dramas is the staccato, abruptly truncated, and very brief “你!” with a falling tone, which from context seems to be similar to the English act of calling out someone’s first name as a reprimand, like “Mark! How dare you say something like that?”
Yeah, pretty much like didn’t you. If you are implying it’s something that shouldn’t be done, you’d lower the overall pitch.
Adding 不會 and/or 還是 like @hannes said would be even clearer. The 不會還是 construction is pretty common as well. 你不會還是送了幾顆蘋果給他了吧