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I understand the meaning of the sentence, but I have difficulties grasping the pattern and how I could extend it to other phrases. Could you please come up with other example sentences with similar patterns?

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This is a sentence with a simple structure. I don't know what special pattern it would have. Subject(一年) + verb(有) + object(春夏秋冬四季). 四季 is an appositive word. – Stan Aug 10 '13 at 11:03

3 Answers 3

I suppose this is a pattern that is to describe a subject, which can be interpreted by different terms, but you can combine them together as a whole, so as to explain it more dramatically.

For the sentence you give, you can say a year has 4 seasons, and a year has spring/summer/autumn/winter. Then you can combine them together a year has spring/summer/autumn/winter 4 seasons.

Another example is

"空间有上下左右前后六个方位" - The space has up/down/let/right/front/back 6 directions.

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In it's most basic form the pattern should be:

subject + verb + (quantity) object

e.g. 一只猫 + 有 + (四条)腿 <-- (brackets not necessary, just trying to make the distinction clear)


一年 + 有 + 四季

In your example the sentence is expanded to list out what each of those items in the object are:

The 四季 includes 春、夏、秋、冬.

So the sentence pattern then becomes something like:

subject + verb + list of objects + (quantity) object

一年 + 有 + 春、夏、秋、冬 + 四季

Here is another example of the same pattern:

我的家 + 有 + 爸爸 妈妈 和 我 + 三个人 (我的家有爸爸妈妈和我三个人)

Additionally, one of the first sentences I learnt from a text book was:


Which is similar to the pattern above, but you can see the place of the number of objects (四口人) is switched with the list of objects. Both ways are acceptable.

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You can also say 一年有四季：春夏秋冬 which has the same meaning. As @stan has said, one of 四季 or 春夏秋冬 is an appositive word. In general, the word as 四季 is put later since it has a function to summerize or explain the words before it. BTW, sometimes, 有 will be canceled, i.e. 一年四季，春夏秋冬. There is a poetry Chinese children will learn:一去二三里，烟村四五家，亭台六七座，八九十枝花, 一去 and 烟村 and 亭台 has the same function as 春夏秋冬 in your example while 二三里 and 四五家 and 六七座 has the same function as 四季.

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