New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax
New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax

Author: Waltraud Paul

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-12-12

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 3110338777

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Mandarin Chinese has become indispensable for crosslinguistic comparison and syntactic theorizing. It is nevertheless still difficult to obtain comprehensive answers to research questions, because Chinese is often presented as an "exotic" language defying the analytical tools standardly used for other languages. This book sets out to demystify Chinese. It places controversial issues in the context of current syntactic theories and offers precise analyses based on a large array of representative data. Although the focus is on Modern Mandarin, earlier stages of Chinese are occasionally referred to in order to highlight striking continuities in its history. VO order is one such constant factor, thus invalidating the idea that Chinese went through a major word order change from OV to VO and back to OV. Another claim often made for Chinese as an isolating language, viz. the existence of an impoverished inventory of parts of speech, is likewise refuted. Other long debated issues addressed here include the relevance of the dichotomy topic vs subject prominence and the role of Chinese as a recurring exception to crosscategorial harmonies posited in typological studies.

Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective

Author: Yen-hui Audrey Li

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 0199945675

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Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective collects twelve new papers that explore the syntax of Chinese in comparison with other languages.

The Cartography of Chinese Syntax
The Cartography of Chinese Syntax

Author: Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-08-12

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0190463791

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This edited volume provides new insights into the architecture of Chinese grammar from a comparative perspective, using principles of cartography. Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that is guided by the view that syntactic structures contain grammatical and functional information that is ideal for semantic interpretation - by studying the syntactic structures of a particular language, syntacticians can better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The chapters in this book map out the "topography" of a variety of constructions in Chinese, specifically information structure, wh-question formation, and peripheral functional elements. The syntactic structure of Chinese makes it an ideal language for this line of research, because functional elements are often spread throughout sentences rather than clumped together as is usually dictated by language-specific morphology. Mapping Chinese syntactic structures therefore offers a window into the origin of heavily "scrambled" constructions often observed in other languages. The book includes a preface that will discusses the goal of cartography and explains how the collection contributes towards our understanding of this approach to syntax. The subsequent seven original articles all contain original syntactic data that is invaluable for future research in cartography, and the collection as a whole paints a broader picture of how the alignment between syntax and semantics works in a principled way.

Chinese Grammar at Work
Chinese Grammar at Work

Author: Shuanfan Huang

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2013-12-15

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9027271364

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Chinese Grammar at Work adopts a cognitive-functional approach and uses a corpus-based methodology to examine how Chinese syntax emerges from natural discourse context and what the evolving grammar at work looks like. In this volume the author weaves together an array of fresh perspectives on clause structure, constructions, interactional linguistics, cognitive science and complex dynamic systems to construct a grammar of spoken Chinese. The volume contains discussions of a large number of topics: contiguity relation, the roles of repair strategies in the shaping of constituent structure, non-canonical word order constructions, pragmatics of referring expressions, classifier constructions, noun-modifying constructions, verb complementation, ethnotheory of the person and constructions specific to the language of emotion, sequential sensitivity of linguistic materials, meaning potential in interaction, the nature of variability and stability in Chinese syntax from the perspective of complexity theory. The result is a volume that highlights the connections between language structure, situated and embodied nature of cognition and language use, and affords a true entrée to the exciting realm of Chinese grammar.

New Perspectives on Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics
New Perspectives on Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics

Author: Barbara Meisterernst

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-12-28

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9811319480

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This book presents new perspectives on the study of Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics. Based on the international Workshop on Aspect and Modality in Chinese, the book includes the latest research findings in the field to make them available not only to specialists in Classical and Buddhist Chinese, but also to researchers and students of general linguistics and of the universals of language. It also discusses different aspects of the AM (Aspect-Modality) and the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Modality) system of Chinese. It provides a comprehensive overview of both of the universally related systems of aspect and modality. The first part of the book focuses on aspectual features of Chinese; these include basic studies on the syntactic representation of the aspectual structure of the verb phrase in Archaic Chinese, the aspectual function of different object constructions and their development, temporal features of the verb phrase, and the aspectual functions of no minalization processes. The second part includes articles highlighting different aspects of the modal system or the interplay between tense, aspect and modality in Chinese, including a survey on the history of studies on modality in Chinese and the modal and temporal aspectual/markers indicating future meanings, a specialized study on modal deontic verbs in the Buddhist Vinaya texts, the modal function of rhetorical questions in Buddhist Chinese, and a study on the diachronic development of the aspectual and modal system in Chinese.

Research on Functional Grammar of Chinese I
Research on Functional Grammar of Chinese I

Author: Bojiang Zhang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 100070758X

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The functional perspective on Chinese syntax has yielded various new achievements since its introduction to Chinese linguistics in the 1980s. This two-volume book is one of the earliest and most influential works to study the Chinese language using functional grammar. With local Beijing vernacular (Pekingese) as a basis, the information structure and focus structure of the Chinese language are systematically examined. By using written works and recordings from Beijingers, the authors discuss topics such as the relationship between word order and focus, and the distinction between normal focus and contrastive focus. In addition, the authors also subject the reference and grammatical categories of the Chinese language to a functional scrutiny while discussion of word classes and their functions creatively combines modern linguistic theories and traditional Chinese linguistic theories. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese linguistics and linguistics in general.

The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar
The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar

Author: Yuzhi Shi

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9789027230621

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This book investigates historical motivations for the emergence of the resultative construction in Chinese from the following four aspects: (a) disyllabification, (b)adjacent context, (c) semantic integrity, and (d) frequency of co-occurence of a pair of verb and resultative. The author also addresses a series of grammatical changes and innovations caused by the formation of this resultative construction, such as the development of aspect, mood, verb reduplication, the new predicate structure, the disposal construction, the passive construction, the verb copying construction, and the new topicalization construction, all of which together shape the grammatical system of Modern Chinese. The present analysis raises and discusses a number of theoretical issues that are meaningful to various linguistic disciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and general historical linguistics.

New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning
New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning

Author: Liming Yu

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1783094338

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When people attempt to learn a new language, the language(s) they already know can help but also hinder their understanding or production of new forms. This phenomenon, known as language transfer, is the focus of this book. The collection offers new theoretical perspectives, some in the empirical studies and some in other chapters, and consists of four sections considering lexical, syntactic, phonological and cognitive perspectives. The volume provides a wealth of studies on the influence of Chinese on the acquisition of English but also includes studies involving Finnish, French, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Spanish, Swedish and Tamil. It will be of great interest to researchers and students working in the areas of crosslinguistic influence in second language acquisition, language pedagogy and psycholinguistics.

Typological Change in Chinese Syntax
Typological Change in Chinese Syntax

Author: Dan Xu

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0199297568

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This new interpretation of the early history of Chinese argues that Old Chinese was typologically a 'mixed' language. It shows that, though its dominant word order was subject-verb-object, this coexisted with subject-object-verb. Professor Xu demonstrates that Old Chinese was not the analytic language it has usually been assumed to be, and that it employed morphological and lexical devices as well as syntactic means. She describes the typological changes that have taken place sincethe Han period and shows how Chinese evolved into a more analytic language, supporting her exposition with abundant examples. She draws where possible on archaeological findings in order to distinguish between versions of texts transmitted and sometimes modified through the hands of generations ofcopyists.The author focusses on syntactic issues, including word order, verbs, causative structures, resultative compounds, and negation, but also pays close attention to what she demonstrates are closely related changes in phonology and the writing system.The book will interest scholars and graduate students of Chinese linguistics, philology, classical literature as well as general linguists interested in word-order typology and language universals. It may be also be used as a text for advanced courses in Classical Chinese and Chinese diachronic syntax.

The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics

Author: Chu-Ren Huang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-08-18

Total Pages: 883

ISBN-13: 1108349668

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The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.