一点 makes 有 valid. According to dictionaries, one of the usage of 有 is to describe extent (how large, how big, how severe, etc.). E. g. 他有两米高. (not 他有高). In your case, 他有一点儿严厉 makes sense, whilst 他有严厉 does not because it doesn't specify the extent(一点儿).
是 + adj is used for emphasis, denoting ...
是+adj is emphasize, but is not acknowledgement. 是 + adj is almost always followed by a "but". For example, 他是严厉，但都是为你好。他是聪明，但是太懒。Here, 是 can be translated as "surely". The previous example can be translated as: Surely he is strict, but that is all for your sake. Surely he is smart, but he is too lazy.
@River It depends on how/where you use it or what you want to express. Context is key. It could be used to repeat/emphasize what others has just said. E. g. A: 你不是说她漂亮吗？B: 她是漂亮啊。Not necessarily always followed by a 'but'. Of course, your examples are valid too. However, we should not limit the scope.
no. 她是漂亮啊 is an incomplete sentence for me. It sounds like you have some hesitation if you stop here. You would say 她很漂亮啊 instead of 她是漂亮啊 if you agree.
You can say "她是真的漂亮", with "是真的" together. Or "是,她很漂亮", where 是 means "yes" instead of "is". But not "她是漂亮“
@River Looks like you are not familiar with the usage. Not sure if a dictionary definition can convince you. Anyways, please refer to sense 7 in this dictionary. 7. 加重语气，有“的确”、“实在”的意思：天气～冷。 zdic.net/hans/%E6%98%AF
@River This is another dictionary definition from my cellphone. 用于形容词或动词性的谓语前，“是”重读，表示坚决肯定，含有“的确”“实在”的意思 这间房子是太小 / 他见解是高明 / 我是有事，不是偷懒。 You can find any decent dictionary that would tell you the usage.
"是+ADJ" does not in itself convey any emphasis. But in contexts where "是" is unnecessary then it conveys emphasis. For some examples with absolutely no emphasis: "他是无辜的" and "她是独一无二的" and "它是连续的". I believe that native speakers do not use "是" with comparable adjectives under normal conditions (hence it conveys emphasis when used); it seems everyone says "她很漂亮" and never something that means merely "she is quite beautiful" in-between "she is very beautiful" and "she is somewhat beautiful". But native speakers do use "是•的" with uncomparable adjectives as in my 3 examples.
@user21820: Good observation. But the distinction cannot be comparative vs non-comparative adjective. Using OP's example (and modify a little), 他是严厉 has the apparent format of noun + 是 + non-comparative adjective. Except 是 here is for emphasis. 是...的 are good cases to bring up. I think they are such because ...的 tend to be verb/noun made into adjectives. Plus, though characters modifying grammatical category is nothing knew, 是...的 could be a bit of imported grammar historically speaking.
@user21820 Your examples demonstrates another usage of 是, which is the linking verb. E. g. 这书是我的。Well, my examples demonstrates the usage of 'emphasis'. E. g. 天气是冷。If you remove 的 in your examples, they would become emphasitic. Eg. 他是无辜。他是独一无二。
@user21820 Another point is 无辜 is adj, but 无辜的 is not. 无辜的 is more like a pronoun replacing 无辜的人 in your example. So, your examples didn't demonstrate the usage of 是 + adj. 我是无辜 is the example that demonstrates 是 + Adj.
dan: I didn't mean that "无辜的" is an adjective, which is why I explicitly stated "是•的" in my last sentence in my above comment. However, for some reason I forgot that you are in fact talking about "是" without "的". Well, I find "他是聪明" and "他是无辜" funny. Can you provide actual articles written by native chinese speakers that contain the phrase? I just did a google search, and this article came up instead.
@Argyll: "严厉" is comparative. One can say "他比她更严厉". I don't know whether historically "是•的" is imported or not. All I have is experience in listening to native speakers speak.
@user21820 I can't find the exact sentence 他是无辜, but dictionaries have a clear definition with the similar example : 天气是冷. I don't know why people take issue with the usage. It's quite a common usage for me. It's quite natural to me indeed.
Honestly, I have never heard native speakers say "天气是冷". As per my previous comment, they instead say "天气很冷" or "天气有点冷" or "天气冷了" (it has gotten cold). How about you provide a native speaker article with the phrase "天气是冷"? By the way, are you a native speaker?
@user21820 Yes, I'm a native speaker. If you don't know it as a native speaker, then you should also learn it because 天气是冷 appears even in official dictionary 新华字典. If you don't believe in 新华字典，then you should not believe in any articles at all. Haha, have fun!
Dictionaries do not necessarily reflect the common people's language. It's strange that you seem to assume otherwise. I ask for articles because they reflect how people actually speak. If you say that everyone in your community use the exact sentence "天气是冷" in speech or writing, then we can consider it a dialectical variation. But if nobody does it, citing a dictionary is meaningless. I hope you didn't mean to be slightly aggressive in your last comment.
@user21820 I don't know which areas you are in. I've been in lots of areas in China. Now in Shanghai. let me try to find the proper written examples if I have time later.
@user21820 Btw, what appears in 新华字典 is considered as a standard Mandarin, not a dialect.
@dan Ok thank you very much. I'm fine with anecdotal evidence if you say you've heard a few native speakers other than yourself say it. By the way, it's not that I have a problem with that particular dictionary. It's just that I've noticed that almost every lexicon in every language I have studied has idiosyncracies and don't correspond well with actual usage.
What appears in a lexicon for Mandarin will naturally be affected by the dialect of the compilers of that lexicon. Ideally, the best lexicons are corpus-based, and would not list any meaning that is not empirically attested in a large corpus of standard speech and writing. Not many lexicons are like this.
@user21820 You can challenge every dictionaries in China, but not 新华字典 published by商务印书馆 and the author is 中国社会科学院语言研究所词典编辑室. It's been well proofread. No dictionaries in China can compete it. Usually, what appears in 新华字典 is considered as the standard mandarin unless it has <方>， which indicates a dialect usage. But this usage doesn't has <方>, which means it's the usage in standard mandarin.
@dan I unfortunately cannot tell you because I sincerely wish to stay anonymous due to having witnessed serious real-life harassment of other users on SE.
But I can tell you that I have lived for decades in a community with native chinese speakers.
And in my opinion, when native speakers use the construction "N是A,...", the "..." specifies the nature of "A", and that is why the construction is permitted.
But never just "N是A。" as a complete sentence. Unless perhaps with exceptional emphasis on "是".
@dan If you notice I didn't really dispute your answer. But I disputed your claim about certain complete sentences spoken by native speakers, because it was too exceptional to ever occur in real life.
Here's an analogy. Suppose I claim that native English speakers say "I great." all the time.
Well your last two are just wrong, from an 'educated dialect' standpoint. It should be "得" not "的".
And verbs with adverbs are not the same as nouns with adjectives, so it's not even relevant to this discussion!
@dan I'll just note that what people use spans a spectrum of dialects, and dialects can have wrong bits. Chinese is not the only language like that. English too. If you hear/read enough you will come across entire communities using "have dove" and "should of" instead of "have dived" and "should've".
And by the way, "goes meaningless" is wrong; you want to say "it is meaningless". I also assume you know the difference between "quite" and "quit".
Hmm. Let's not give up on each other's viewpoint. Remember that we are hooked to the topic because we like it. That's a rare commonality that deserves to be remembered.
I can confirm that all 4 of 这女孩真漂亮, 这女孩是漂亮, 他篮球打的真好, 他篮球打的是好 are commonly said. (I am also inclined to conclude that all 4 are colloquial only.) These examples, however, don't conclude 漂亮 or 好 are adjectives. By extension they also don't conclude linking verb + adjective are a thing in Chinese
Adjectives -- a very successful categorization in English -- are words descriptive quality that decorates nouns. In English, utility of this definition is enhanced by the stable ordering of article + adjective + noun. (By stable I mean you do not have large quantity of cases with a different order. You dont at all.)
@Argyll No that's not what I mean by "adjective" at all. I am using the standard linguistic notion of adjectives, which in English has fixed word order but has very flexible word order in other languages.
just like "beauty" can be a descriptive quality but is not used as a noun
right, so i will comment on that shortly
You can yourself as well as anyone propose structures that may become more productive and effective in various measures. The reason the structure I used is productive is not only what I am about to say as the structure of English sentences being commonly accepted, it is because now you have a system of differentiating adjectives vs non adjectives, and a person (or a computer program) can use that to predict the position of adjectives in English sentences which will be legible
-- without having encountered them
That brings about a natural authority to such a system
The system is: an English sentence (without dependent clauses) consists of a verb phrase + noun phrase
I need to go, but here is evidence that my view of the grammatical function of the above words as adjectives is the 'correct' one. As you said, there can be many different consistent descriptions of the same system, but some are simpler than others. Mine is the simplest.
"大朵美丽的花" has two adjectives "大朵" and "美丽". The "的" is a grammatical particle used to join the adjectives to the noun phrase. It is not part of the adjectives.
You see, the definition of adjective as what decorates noun English does not come from some sort of consensus process. There is a natural bias towards what is useful and productive. It is that bias that makes the definition.
I am not aware of the same kind of structure having been proposed for Chinese
> In case of a mentally incompetent person, notice hereof shall be given the guardian or other person having custody or control of such person or, if none, to such person’s nearest relative if known.
I just randomly clicked around in the US law and I can find it.
> (a) Whenever any veteran (admitted as a veteran), or a dependent or survivor of a veteran receiving care under the penultimate sentence of section 1781(b) of this title, shall die while a member or patient in any facility, or any hospital while being furnished care or treatment therein by the Department, and shall not leave any surviving spouse, next of kin, or heirs entitled, under the laws of the decedent’s domicile
Look I am a native English speaker and I have read thousands if not tens of thousands of formal articles.
We are taught that that possessive construct is not entirely formal. However, this is prescriptive, and does not reflect actual formal usage of English.
So in formal writing we native writers sometimes try to avoid it. But when it gets unwieldy to avoid, we don't.
The reason to parse separately is that we native speakers understand it as separate. We learn (both from teachers and from experience) that whenever we have a noun N, we can form the construct "N's X" to mean "X pertaining to N".
This does not just include possession. Hence "pertaining".
One major issue is that across very different natural human languages we are allowed to use adjectives to modify a noun as well as use them as the object of an equative verb.
So without assuming implicit linking verb, the structure of verb phrase + noun phrase making into sentences will break down. That'd be an observation from 那朵花漂亮
(we should try dropping 很 in composing examples if we can. that makes it look as if 很 plays a special role)
@Argyll Why should we not assume implicit linking verb, when the evidence is there? In particular, the verb appears whenever we want to express some verbal aspect that the implicit verb does not.
If you enforce the labeling of adjective due to usage in linking verb + said word. And in that, you are required to assume implicit linking verb. You would need to differentiate adjective that can decorate noun and ones that are not, is that right?
Ya, please come back :) I should hurry up on my work stuffs too :P
@Argyll No, in my explanation "漂亮" is an adjective and "漂亮的" is not, and every adjective can be the object of the (implicit or explicit) equative verb. That's it for now!
There are two things we can do. One is to motivate the assumption of implicit linking verb. btw, in that structure, topic + comment structure is not a real thing. Comment is the adjective phrase. Linking verb is not seen due to being implicit.
In this version, I'd prefer to make the verb optional instead of saying a verb is implicit.
There is one more problem: the verb goes with the comment. Not the subject. Yet at least the version I learned is to group verb with the subject and say that's a verb phrase. (That's successful in English.)
The other thing we can do is to try finding literature where recursive grouping of sentence component is done. But that's hard cuz we need a (good) review paper to know the relative prevalence of various possibilities in different applications. Such a review paper would be rather specialised and just may not be there. You can probably find it in specific context with more readily.
* In this version, I'd prefer to make the verb optional instead of saying a verb is implicit. And say topic + comment or action is the actual top level structure. Comment and action both become verb phrase or however else you would name it most appropriately. Not verb phrase + noun phrase. That should change the resultant assignment of grammatical categories closer to what you see.
Discussion on answer by dan: Using 有 …
Discussion on answer by dan: Using 有 …