Speculative Grammarian Podcast

Review of Zhang, Jiannan, “The Relationships between Processes and Participants in Chinese: A Cognitive Approach”; by Jan Vanderkeller; From Volume I, Number 3, of Better Words and Morphemes, The Journal of the Linguistic Society of South-Central New Caledonia, May 1991 — Dr. Zhang seems to be laboring under a strange delusion. To wit, as far as I can tell, he thinks that there are only 300 verbs in Chinese. Where he got this idea, I have no idea, since most people know that there are a total of 307 verbs in Chinese. Even more strangely, he has included in his sample two verbs, kan ‘look at, read’ and chi ‘eat’, which are not even really Chinese, but rather pseudo-Chinese (see Pengyou 1988 for discussion). This means that he includes only 298 of the actual 307 verbs of Chinese in his discussion. (Read by Keith Slater.)