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> But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words. This is overstated. Both of those concepts are present at a robust level in English. As such, English obviously does have constructs for them. Measure words are the really obvious one. Any treatment of English grammar will mention the distinction between "count" nouns, which have plural forms, and "mass" nouns, which don't. Mass nouns require measure words in exactly the same manner that Chinese nouns do. They are common; some mass nouns that are almost always used to refer to discrete items, but which nevertheless require their appropriate measure words, are "pants" (you can have a pair of pants, but not a pants), scissors (ditto), and bread (which has its own specialized measure word, "loaf"). Change of state is often not marked syntactically in English, though it can be. But it is very commonly marked lexically -- see the distinction between "being married" and "getting married", or "being on fire" and "catching fire". I think lexical marking of grammatical concepts is an under-studied phenomenon. There is a traditional division of verbs in linguistics into those that express "states", "activities", "accomplishments", and "achievements". You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect (and just look at what they named the concept!). It's called "lexical aspect" because the different categories are expressed, in English, by choosing different words. But they don't have to be; the difference between an activity and an accomplishment is expressed in Mandarin Chinese with a syntactic marker. Where English says "look" and "see", Mandarin has 看 and 看到. Where English has "listen" and "hear", Mandarin has 听 and 听到. Where English has "search" and "find", Mandarin has 找 and 找到. It's only a lexical distinction if you assume that English is more Platonically correct than Chinese is. Similarly, Indo-European languages generally have a syntactic distinction between factual conditionals ("if I'm the king, why do I have to wait?") and counterfactual conditionals ("if I were the king, I wouldn't have to wait!"). (Fun side note: for hopefully obvious reasons, where this distinction exists for sentences set in the future, they're called "future more vivid" and "future less vivid" as opposed to "future factual" and "future counterfactual". We use a different word even though the grammatical distinction is identical.) English makes this distinction syntactically, as you'd expect. But it also makes it lexically -- "hope" and "wish" are the more-vivid and less-vivid equivalents of each other. |