On page 43 of Chaofen Sun's 'Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction' (CUP 2006), there is a rather brain-numbing discussion of how changes in tone (i.e. selectively applying tone sandhi rules) to 'Lao3 Li3 mai3 hao3 jiu3' might apparently convey differing meanings ('Old Li bought good wine' versus 'Old Li finished buying wine').
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nGjfCnUQwS8C&lpg=PA7&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q=&f=false
My question is, wouldn't it be easier/more natural to just rephrase things, alter the word order? For example, I would probably (though as a non-native speaker of Mandarin) try something like 'Lao Li jiu mai hao le' to express 'Lao Li (has) finished buying/(has) bought (the/some) wine', and perhaps try something like inserting a 'hao' between the 'Li' and 'jiu' just then to add the idea of the wine that he'd bought being good wine.
Any thoughts, advice, comments?
That would indeed violate innate UG rules. It is not found in any natural human language... there would be no syntactic model which would be able to account for such a grammar.
I wud like to resolve yr puzzle from any well educated Mandarin-speaking Chinese though Shuimo knows little about linguistics, as indicated by such horrible jargons as sandhi whose meaning wud be greek to me without dictionary check!
'Old Li bought good wine' versus 'Old Li finished buying wine'
老李买好酒
This is a good case of tone-triggered confusion and ambivalence in Chinese!
Without context, the above short sensence can mean either！
But in actual real life conversation, such confusion seldom occurs!
The context of the conversation wud natually indicate which meaning such a sentence wud take on!
If you mean 'Lao Li (has) finished buying/(has) bought (the/some) wine', you wud pronounce 好 without any accented stress!
If you mean 'Old Li bought good wine', you wud pronounce 好 with considerable stress!
>>I would probably (though as a non-native speaker of Mandarin) try something like 'Lao Li jiu mai hao le' to express 'Lao Li (has) finished buying/(has) bought (the/some) wine', <<
This wud certainly do the work, but it is unnecessarily burdensome!
In natural conversation, the intrusion of 了 can be even awkward!
In Chinese, people tend to speak in short sentences but in rapid succession!
The absence or presence of one word wud make quite a difference to the feel of a sentence it conveys!
>>>and perhaps try something like inserting a 'hao' between the 'Li' and 'jiu' just then to add the idea of the wine that he'd bought being good wine. <<<
This makes no sense to Shuimo, we Chinese wud never say this by changing word order this way to mean such an idea!
Case 1
If you mean 'Lao Li (has) finished buying/(has) bought (the/some) wine', you wud pronounce 好 without any accented stress!
Case 2
If you mean 'Old Li bought good wine', you wud pronounce 好 with considerable stress!
============================
Here 好 serves different purposes in part-of-speech!
In case 1, 好 functions like 了 and is a purely gramatical aid!
In case 2, 好 is an adjective!
Any Mandrin-speaking Chinese wud immediately know how to pronounce it differently as the context requires! It is just a matter of instinction to Shuimo and my fellow Chinese! Nothing mystical! LOL