Here’s a headline from the wires today:
Vice premier calls for continuous efforts amid ravage by Bilis
The article is not, in itself, very interesting, I realize. In fact it is the most mundane of headlines and this is why I draw attention to it: The style is very much par for the local media course. Political leaders are always “calling for” or “urging” people to do things. Politically, it’s unlike what you’d hear western leaders doing. On further thought I realized I don’t know how to ‘call for’ or ‘urge’ in this context in Mandarin. How do you say that? I would wager that there must be some real lexical beauties in there (collocations, most likely).
I think it may be time to start looking a bit more at rhetoric in politics and business and see how it all works. Good job we’ve got the dedicted advanced feed now - even though some of this could be treated at lower levels.
In fact, I call upon our academic team to look closely at this situation…
Ken carroll
It’s true. Political language in China is quite distinct, and it spreads to the news. I can’t however, think of any examples without going back to my old textbooks (not with me at the moment). The one thing I do remember is sentences that can make you pass out from lack of breathing when you read them out, containing subordinate clauses that confuse you completely. I remember trying to work out sentences and finally working out what was going on when I got to a 的 and realised that the last 20 characters were a separate clause describing the object of the verb, which I still hadn’t gotten to (smaller example: 我现在看我昨天在百货商店跟我三十多年认识的朋友新买的书 I’m currently reading the book I bought from the department store yesterday with my friend whom I’ve known for more than thirty years). The basic sentence (我现在看书) is simple enough, but add the description of when where and with who, and it gets a little more complex… I haven’t flipped my head around having the head of a subordinate clause at the end. It creeps up on me.