Grammar Q&A

Author: Zhu Dexi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: Originally, this was intended to be a simple book for foreigners who don't understand much Chinese or for Chinese who don't grasp grammar well. The purpose was to analyze and comment on some basic concepts and viewpoints that often spark debates. However, when it came time to write, it became apparent that it couldn't be as simple as originally planned. If it were, many principles wouldn't be fully explained. But it couldn't be too complex either, since it wasn't written for experts. As a result, it ended up like this: neither high nor low.
There are two types of grammar books: one that focuses on language facts, and one that focuses on theory or methodology. This book touches on very few language facts and has no advanced theories. In this sense, it's also neither high nor low.
This book doesn't mention compound sentences because the issues related to compound sentences have already been discussed in another small book (Grammatical Lectures, 1982, Commercial Press), so there's no need to repeat them in the form of dialogues here.
In this book, the verbal component before the object or complement is called the predicate. Phrases are sometimes referred to as syntactic structures, so subject-predicate structures and subject phrases, predicate-object structures and verb-object phrases, etc., all mean the same thing. Additionally, syntactic components are the same as sentence components as generally described in other books.