Posted 2017/8/15
A word is the smallest meaningful unit in a language, and is used as the basic material to express ideas. Therefore, if you want to learn Chinese and be skilled at mandarin Chinese, words are the beginning. In Chinese, words can be divided into two kinds, notional words and function words. Nouns, verbs, auxiliary verbs, adjectives, numerals, measure words and pronouns belong to the notional word category; adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, particles, interjections and onomatopes belong to the function word category. Besides, there are two kinds of affixes, namely, prefixes and suffixes.
Normally a word belongs to a certain part of speech. But some words have the grammatical function of two of more parts of speech. Here are two examples. The word “恋爱” is used as a noun in “谈恋爱”, while it is used as a verb in “他们谈恋爱了”. The word “给” is used as a verb in the sentence “给他一支笔” while “给” is a preposition in the sentence “给我们介绍”. In the phrase “内容丰富”, “丰富” is an adjective, meaning rich. while in the phrase “丰富内容”, “丰富” becomes a verb meaning “to enrich”. In this case, 丰富 belongs to two different parts of speech: adjective and verb. This is called conversion of parts of speech, for instance, they belong to different parts of speech without any change in form.
If the meaning of a word in different sentences remains unchanged, it is not considered conversion although it has different functions. For example:我们学习 and 学习很重要, in both sentences, 学习is a verb.
