Grammar Q&A -- Chinese Language Knowledge Series

Author: Zhu Dexi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1985-07-01
Features: Originally, this was intended to be a simple book for foreigners who don't understand much Chinese or Chinese people who don't grasp grammar well. The purpose was to analyze and comment on some basic concepts and viewpoints that often cause debates. However, when it came time to write, it became clear 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 being neither high nor low—neither sophisticated enough for experts nor simple enough for beginners.
There are two types of grammar books: one that focuses on language facts, and one that emphasizes 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 them have already been discussed in another small book (Grammar Lectures, 1982, Commercial Press). 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.