It’s pretty dangerous to know just a little bit about something, so they say, and speech acts are a subject about which syz’s knowledge is about as bountiful as honesty on Valentine’s day. If the old saw is true, then, reading the rest of this post is like running with scissors.
So limited is the knowledge of speech acts at the Beijing Sounds studios that never once up until now has the term been used, despite the subject matter having presented the opportunity on multiple occasions. This post, for example, bumbled around with ungainly phrasing to the effect that “a big part of language learning is knowing what to say/listen for in a given social situation.” In that case it mentioned
- What phrase a waitress would use to apologize
- What a cashier would ask you about your massage receipt
Or earlier there was this post, that brought up how a Beijinger would
- Get introduced to a brother-in-law’s coworker
- Close a phone conversation with a sure-to-be-unsuccessful job applicant
- Inch through a crowd towards the subway door
The point in each case was that the appropriate words were often different from Mandarin to English — even though the situation was the same. In the case of the slow-service waitress, the apology took an almost unrecognizable form; in the case of the brother-in-law’s coworker, maybe the act involved no words at all.
It’s not like I didn’t try to find the right word. Distant whispers from grad school kept saying that there was some better way to describe this idea. A simple term, clear and transparent. But what? How do you look up a term when you only half-know the idea? It’s almost as bad as trying to remember where a tune is from. You ask a few people you think might know, but you describe it badly. You go through hours of tangentially interesting but ultimately fruitless web searching…
Then finally, a year after you were trying to think of the word, you stumble across it in a humdrum way, used just as you wanted to remember it in someone else’s blog entry.
Ah, yes, some of it starts to come back. John Searle (also of Chinese Room fame) wrote in his book, Speech Acts, that a speech act would need three components:
- Performing an utterance act — i.e. a bunch of words/sounds come out
- Performing a propositional act — i.e. there is a reference and a predicate that goes with it
- Performing an illocutionary act — i.e. trying to accomplish some social act; e.g. warn, request, apologize, demand, argue…
OK, sort of makes sense if you work backwards, right?
- Try to do something that involves other people
- Make a reference to it
- Verbalize that reference
If you apply it to the apologizing waitress
- She’s trying to apologize
- (and 3.) she makes a speech act to complete the task
The trouble for the Zhonglish speaker unfamiliar with Beijing culture is that if (1.) it is not clear what social act is being undertaken, and (3.) the actual speech is unfamiliar, then you end up with utter misapprehension even though you might understand the actual words involved.
So try this one on for size. Let’s say your father-in-law has been visiting for the day and now the conversation has wound down and the chive dumplings (韭菜饺子 / jiǔcài jiǎozi) have been pretty thoroughly digested. It’s time for him to be heading back to the southern suburbs of the city so you can spend some time getting packed for the next day’s flight to the US. You’re seeing him off and Lǎoye （老爷 = maternal grandfather) puts his arm around your shoulders…
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wǒ bù sòng nǐ le
我不送你了
I won’t be seeing you off*
And he heads off to the subway.
What just happened is that he said goodbye, of course, but he did it in a way the an English-speaker could get away with only in a spaghetti western. And then only if he were lugubrious and grim-faced. And even there it would imply something more than a simple goodbye — maybe something more like “I’m off to handle manly work of a dangerous and ineffable nature.”
But in our case he’s really just making a bit of an apology for skipping out on the Chinese ritual sendoff, in which you typically escort guests into the bowels of the airport until security has to restrain you or if (god forbid!) they are leaving by car it is preferable to attempt to pile in the back seat with them and provide snacks from your rucksack in the hope that you might actually accompany them home safely (you could always return by train).
More to the point: he’s saying goodbye.
“See you next time” or “have a safe trip”? That stuff’s for foreigners.
————-
*There’s probably a whole thesis in how to properly translate 了 / le in this case. Maybe you grammar types can take it on.
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Comments 10
You want to know about 了， I’ll give you 了。
Possibilities (not mutually exclusive.)
1. 持续. Changes the sentence
我不送你。 – I won’t see you off.
to
我不送你了。 – I won’t be seeing you off.
This has the effect, like in english of changing the aspect/tense, and also ’softening the tone.’ Chinese people will inevitably tell you that this is what 了 signifies here （softening the tone), (if they have an explanation at all.) and this 了 is often called (horribly) ’语气‘ 了. Don’t take their word for it, the logic often gets traced back to something like ‘chinese doesn’t have tenses’ or ‘tense doesn’t work like that in chinese’ and other silly ideas like ‘chinese doesn’t have a grammar’ (if you define grammar by sole definition of verb conjugation.)
This distinction can be seen in the difference between the phrase.
我不要了。
and
我不要。
Chinese people are in denial of tense in their language for the most part and will often fall back to any excuse to not permit it. Whether the 2nd example is dealing with tense/aspect is an open question and you should put some thought into it.
the 了 in 不送你了 lets the speaker emphasize the continuation of the state and or verb action into the future and or emphasize it’s effect on the current situation and future situation.
2. 我不送你了 implicitly assumes a proper chinese ’seeing of one’s guests out is required’ and hence this requires a 了 to show a change in the state of things/situation.
3. Fixed use formed by habit/grammar rules that are tough to fully understand. Ex. 就。。。了， 不。。。了。 are sometimes just a grammatical structure where the 了 in and of itself really doesn’t function except as a part of the structure.
Posted 14 Feb 2009 at 10:19 pm ¶hsknotes: Grammatical tense is defined as a very specific concept, indicating when the state or action occurred. The “tenses” in English and many other European languges however, end up conflating grammatical aspect and grammatical mood as well though. When people say that Chinese does not have tense, they are referring to the former definition, rather than the latter.
From your examples above, adding the sentence-final 了 actually does not change the time under which the sentences are referring to (so there is no change in tense). However, it does change the modality of the sentence from being declarative to expository.
For instance, adding 了 in 我不要了 changes the meaning from “I don’t want it” to “I don’t want it after all.” The tense has not changed at all. What has changed is the modality of the sentence.
Another illustration to show that 我不要 and 我不要了 do not indicate tense is that they can also be translated as “I didn’t want it” and “I didn’t want it after all”, respectively. The tenses have changed in the translation, but the original Chinese sentences remained the same because they don’t specify the exact tense.
BTW, what I just said only applies to sentence-final 了, which is different from post-verb 了, which is used as an aspect marker rather than a mood marker (but it doesn’t denote tense either).
Posted 15 Feb 2009 at 8:03 am ¶To address the original sentence, 我不送你了, I would say that number 2 of hsknotes’ possible explanations fits best. Sentence-final 了 indicates a change in situation, but by doing so, implies a counterfactual explanation of something that was believed to be true. 我不送你了 indicates that 老爷 would have sent you off if he had the ability to, but for whatever reason, he can’t, so he’s offering you this explanation as an apology.
Posted 15 Feb 2009 at 8:27 am ¶Claw.
Yes you are correct with the conflation example. When I teach ‘tenses’ I always treat present perfect and present tense as different tenses, when in fact the change is not in tense. We tend to mutilate that word, I know.
I’m a little confused by your final comments because I don’t necessarily treat the 了 in 不送你了 or 不要了 as final-sentence 了， unless you think 语气 了 is one kind of final sentence 了。
Also, while your translations are fine if you assume the 了 is indicating a change of state, I really don’t think that’s what is going on in either of those cases (perhaps the first one) most of the time they are used. They are used to soften the tone, but not necessarily in an ‘after all’ sort of way. I get the explanation from chinese people sometimes and it never sounds the least bit credible. Here it adds a continuous aspect or a tinge of a perfect aspect (one of it’s common effects as a 语气 了) and through that changes the feel/客气。
Posted 15 Feb 2009 at 10:39 am ¶我不送你了。 我有事。
Posted 15 Feb 2009 at 11:48 am ¶Ah, the wonderful vagueness of the Chinese.
Nothing like a Scandinavian goodbye… it keeps going and going and going…
do you fight robots?
Posted 15 Feb 2009 at 1:42 pm ¶All the time. Thanks for asking Hsknotes. But when I’m not fighting… I study Chinese and draw. You?
Posted 16 Feb 2009 at 7:58 am ¶mostly robot fighting
Posted 16 Feb 2009 at 11:27 am ¶perhaps we can fight some together…
my apologies to the BEIJING sounds guy.
Posted 16 Feb 2009 at 12:25 pm ¶Claw:
I agree. The 了 in the 我不送你了 is a way of saying that normally he would take you to the airport, but for whatever reason, that is not possible now. Meaning a change of state.
That’s what the grammar tells us, but am I the only one who would argue that 了 in these kinds of polite phrases are more about making an excuse, than actually describing a change. Maybe that’s the same thing, I don’t know… It’s most def an excuse, but in order to get away with it, you make it sound like an exception. So one could say that the 了 here is not really optional, you would never say 我不送你, that would be too harsh and maybe a bit blunt too.
Posted 18 Feb 2009 at 5:56 am ¶