posted by bluppfisk on October 4, 2013 | 4 comments
HiEvery time I'm trying to build a sentence and looking for information about how to go about building it, I hit a wall. Maybe I'm not searching for the right terms, or I haven't found the right resources... I don't know. Concrete example:I was trying to make a sentence with quite a few attributive adjuncts. I learned you can do this with 的-clauses, but my final sentence"从一家我在离北京市区不到30公里的团结镇发现的青旅可以去探索附近的山谷。",which is supposed to mean"From a youth hostel I discovered in Tuanjie town, less than 30 km away from Beijing centre, one can explore nearby valleys."doesn't quite sound right. But I cannot for the love of me find more information about how far I can go with nesting in Chinese sentences.Now I don't necessarily want anyone to explain to me how far I can go with nesting (although you're welcome to do so), but I'd like to find out how I will find information about it by myself.Who can help?
hi bluppfisk,
This sentence is a bit long and confusing because of the clause, so in that case, it would be better to split the sentence in two and connect them with "starting from there".
So you could say "我在离北京市区不到30公里的团结镇发现了一家青年旅社，你可以从那开始去探索附近的山谷" and the second part could be"从那(开始)，你可以(一路)去附近的山谷里探索" which would sound more native.
There's a book called (现代汉语生成语法 - "A Generative Grammar of Mandarin Chinese") which may help with attributive clauses. Hope it helps. :)
- Grace