—— Chen Yanjie, Changle Road, Shanghai
A: According to media reports, this year's Peking University self-enrollment examination questions gave two sentences: "We all have a family named Hua" and "The blue-and-white brushwork outlined by vegetarian embryos turned from thick to light", requiring candidates to analyze the mistakes in these two cases from a grammatical perspective.
Whether there are grammatical errors in the previous sentence is obvious to both grammar learners and people with a good sense of language, so there is no need to say more here. As for the last sentence, because it is the lyrics of a popular pop song "Blue and White Porcelain", it has attracted more social attention, and the right and wrong inside are more complicated.
Are there any sick sentences in the lyrics of the popular song Blue and White Porcelain? My answer is: Yes.
Then, is the first sentence "a blank embryo sketching a blue and white stroke" a "sick sentence" with grammatical errors? My answer is: not necessarily.
If the lyrics of "the blank embryo outlines the brush strokes of blue and white" are broken, it should be said that there is no grammatical error. First of all, let's look at "embryo sketching blue and white". For this sentence, some scholars believe that it is wrong to use "vegetarian embryo" (referring to the unfired ceramic bottle) as the subject here, and it should be used as an adverbial, omitting the prepositions "zai" and "Shang", which becomes a grammatically wrong "sick sentence". It is correct to write this sentence as "Draw a blue and white picture on a vegetarian embryo". I think this statement is far-fetched, probably because of the influence of the questioner and a preconceived idea. In fact, there is no grammatical error in the sentence "embryo outlines blue and white" As long as we clearly know that Chinese grammar is concise and flexible, and understand that Chinese verbs have both active and passive attributes in sentences, it is not difficult to understand the sentence "prime embryo outlines blue and white", which really means "prime embryo outlines blue and white".
Because Chinese grammarians have been influenced by western grammar for a long time, they have subconsciously treated Chinese with western grammar. For example, English verbs have morphological changes, which means that passive concepts can be appended with "ed" after verbs, but can Chinese? If my reasons are not enough, let's give an example of "Facts speak louder than words". The structure of "knocking out a big gap in the bowl" is exactly the same as that of "a vegetarian embryo sketching out blue and white". If everyone thinks that there is no grammatical error in the former, then what reason is there to say that there is a grammatical error in "sketching blue and white with vegetarian embryos"? Similar examples are "We are defeated" and "We are defeated". I believe that any native Chinese speaker in China will intuitively know that these two sentences have the same meaning, and think that the former is more like Chinese, while the latter looks like fake Chinese influenced by western grammar. Why? Mainly, the Chinese verb "defeat" has active and passive semantics.
Let's look at the sentence "the pen is thick and light". There is no grammatical error in this sentence. Anyone whose mother tongue is Chinese in China knows that it means: "The brush strokes of drawing blue and white flowers change from thick to light". The reason why it is not written like this, but written as "the pen is thick and light" is to express the need for simplicity. If grammatical analysis is to be carried out, it belongs to grammatical "ellipsis" and will not cause difficulties or ambiguities in understanding in the context. Since the word "from thick to light" is enough to express, why do you use the word "from thick to light" 1 1? In fact, this goes back to the "concise and elastic" feature of Chinese grammar mentioned earlier.
In short, there is basically no problem with the phrase "blank embryo outlines blue and white pen" If you must be demanding, then there should be a comma after this sentence "blue and white". I don't know what the exact words are, but what I see from the internet and print media is without sentence breaks. However, poetry has always been unconventional in sentence ridicule, and the lyrics of popular songs also belong to the category of poetry.
In fact, not only in terms of sentence ridicule, but also in terms of syntax, poetry often breaks through grammatical conventions. This situation is very common in China's Tang poetry, Song ci and Yuan qu. For example, in the Tang poetry, "The crow crows in Maodian Moon, and people are full of frost on Banqiao" (the article "Be good and leave early"), and in the Song poetry, "The old vines are faint, the bridges are flowing, and the horses are thin on the ancient roads" (Ma Zhiyuan's "Tianjingsha") are all sentences. If these famous sentences are analyzed by modern western grammar or Chinese grammar reformed by western grammar, they are definitely "sick sentences". There are also Du Fu's famous phrase "Red beans peck at fragrant rice grains, and the old phoenix branches lean against the green trees" ("Eight Poems of Autumn Prosperity"), and Wang Wei's famous phrase "Bamboo leaves sing home, lotus leaves collect fishing boats" ("Autumn Night in the Mountains"). , may not stand the grammatical analysis and become a "sick sentence". In fact, the former is a rhetorical method of "arranging brocade" and the latter is a rhetorical method of "inverted sentences".
Anyone who has studied linguistics knows two basic principles of linguistics: language develops and changes, and language is a social phenomenon. If we understand the principle of language development and change, we should realize the rationality of a series of language innovations through rhetorical means. Without innovation, a language will become an extinct language without life. Grammatical norms are also needed. Without grammatical norms, it is difficult for members of society to exchange ideas or feelings through language. However, grammatical norms are not static, but dynamic. In fact, many grammatical phenomena in history are solidified by rhetorical phenomena. After understanding the principle that language is a social phenomenon, we can see that the statement recognized by most people, not a few grammarians, is legal and more vital.
In short, it is probably more scientific, objective and realistic to adopt an open attitude towards language phenomena, especially some language phenomena in poetry (including pop songs) creation, rather than rigidly adopting the so-called "grammatical scale" to regulate them.