17.6 Predicative Adjectives without Adverbs

In Grammar and Vocabulary 16.8, we learned that we put an adverb (the default adverb 好 hou2 or other degree words) between the subject and the predicative adjective.

There are some situations where we don’t need to add the adverb. In this lesson, we will see the following two situations. Both occur when we ask and answer questions.

We usually don’t need to add an adverb when asking and answering yes-no questions formed with the X-not-X construction of a predicative adjective.

We also usually don’t need to add an adverb when asking and answering questions formed with a question word (e.g., 幾時 gei2 si4 ‘when’, 邊度 bin1 dou6 ‘where’).