Current Issues in Chinese Linguistics
Current Issues in Chinese Linguistics

Author: Hooi Ling Soh

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-07-12

Total Pages: 615

ISBN-13: 1443832480

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Chinese is the most commonly spoken language in the world and one of the very few contemporary languages whose history is documented in an unbroken tradition extending back to the second millennium. Compared with Western languages, Chinese has a typology with distinguished features in sound system, syntax, and discourse that have a strong impact on Chinese linguistics studies and language learning. Drawing on theoretical models from formal and functional linguistics, discourse analysis, computer-assisted corpus studies, language socialization, and second language acquisition, this volume presents new advances and addresses a broad range of current issues in the study of Chinese linguistics with research studies that originated from the proceedings of the 21st North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-21). As globalization presses on, more and more people are interested in Chinese – its history, structure, research, and new developments. This volume aims to be instrumental. Written in a coherent and structured style, each section is concentrated on a particular linguistic area, and each chapter is self-contained with a clear focus and theoretical framework. It will be valuable to linguists, educators, administrators, specialists, teachers and students of Chinese as a native, second, heritage, or foreign language.

Current Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse
Current Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse

Author: Yun Xiao

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-04-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9027262985

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This volume features a discourse empirical orientation from diverse perspectives and various methodologies, in which narratives, interviews, surveys, and large-scale databases or self-created written and spoken corpora are employed and analyzed to gain a better understanding of new developments and changes in Chinese language and discourse. Authors employ updated approaches from a variety of fields, including applied linguistics, functional linguistics, corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics, to describe the structure of Chinese language and discourse and to examine its critical issues, many focusing on globalization-induced language developments and changes. With an empirically-based discourse/socio-cultural approach, this collection makes valuable contributions to research on Chinese language and discourse and serves as a sound reference for Chinese researchers and educators in diverse fields such as Chinese language and discourse, Chinese linguistics and language education, Chinese multiculturalism, and more.

The Roots of Old Chinese
The Roots of Old Chinese

Author: Laurent Sagart

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 9027236909

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The phonology, morphology and lexicon of late Zhou Chinese are examined in this volume. It is argued that a proper understanding of Old Chinese morphology is essential in correctly reconstructing the phonology. Based on evidence from word-families, modern dialects and related words in neighboring languages, Old Chinese words are claimed to consist of a monosyllabic root, to which a variety of derivational affixes attached. This made Old Chinese typologically more like modern languages such as Khmer, Gyarong or Atayal, than like Middle and modern Chinese, where only faint traces of the old morphology remain. In the first part of the book, the author proposes improvements to Baxter's system of reconstruction, regarding complex initials and rhymes, and then reviews in great detail the Old Chinese affixal morphology. New proposals on phonology and morphology are integrated into a coherent reconstruction system. The second part of the book consists of etymological studies of important lexical items in Old Chinese. The author demonstrates in particular the role of proportional analogy in the formation of the system of personal pronouns. Special attention is paid to contact phenomena between Chinese and neighboring languages, and — unlike most literature on Sino-Tibetan — the author identifies numerous Chinese loanwords into Tibeto-Burman. The book, which contains a lengthy list of reconstructions, an index of characters and a general index, is intended for linguists and cultural historians, as well as advanced students.

Integrating Chinese Linguistic Research and Language Teaching and Learning
Integrating Chinese Linguistic Research and Language Teaching and Learning

Author: Hongyin Tao

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2016-10-03

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 9027266352

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Linguistic research and language teaching have generally been viewed as two separate types of academic endeavor. While linguists have been preoccupied with pattern finding and theory building, language teachers often encounter issues that are not readily addressed by theoretical linguistic research. This collection, with eleven papers touching upon a wide range of issues, stands out as one of the rare concerted efforts toward a meaningful integration of the two endeavors. Subject matters include tone, stress, word structure, grammatical categories (e.g. classifiers), syntactic structures (including argument structure), discourse particles, implicit and explicit knowledge, conversational repair, and learner corpus. With a diverse range of theoretical orientations, this collection serves to showcase some of the productive ways to create synergy between Chinese linguistic research and language education.

Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)
Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)

Author: Jing Tsu

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0735214743

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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 What does it take to reinvent a language? After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology. Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao's phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today. With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research
Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research

Author: Istvan Kecskes

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-06-26

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1317336569

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Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research presents and discusses research projects that serve as theoretical grounding for improving the teaching and learning of Chinese as a second language (CSL) in order to help researchers and practitioners better understand the acquisition, development, and use of CSL. With the exception of the first chapter, which is state-of-the-art, each chapter makes an attempt to bring together theory and practice by focusing on theory building and theory application in practice. The book is organized around areas where most future research is needed in CSL: phonology, semantics, grammar, and pragmatics. Consisting of contributions from an international group of scholars working on cutting-edge research, this is the ideal text for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in the area of Chinese as a second or foreign language.

Chinese as a Heritage Language
Chinese as a Heritage Language

Author: Agnes Weiyun He

Publisher: Natl Foreign Lg Resource Ctr

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0824832868

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"The authors examine the socio-cultural, cognitive-linguistic, and educational-institutional trajectories along which Chinese as a Heritage Language may be acquired, maintained and developed. It draws upon developmental psychology, functional linguistics, linguistic and cultural anthropology, discourse analysis, orthography analysis, reading research, second language acquisition, and bilingualism. This volume aims to lay a foundation for theories, models, and master scripts to be discussed, debated, and developed, and to stimulate research and enhance teaching both within and beyond Chinese language education."--BOOK JACKET.

Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography
Current Issues in Syntactic Cartography

Author: Fuzhen Si

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9027259771

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This book illustrates recent developments in cartographic studies, seen from a comparative perspective. The different chapters explore various aspects of theoretical and descriptive syntax, bearing on such topics as selection, causativity, binding, light verb constructions, the structure of the high and low peripheral zones. Syntactic issues in the study of dialects and ancient languages are also addressed. The languages investigated include French, Hebrew, Standard Dutch and the Ghent dialect, Etruscan, Japanese, English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese and the Teochew dialect. The intended readers of this book include researchers and students working on natural language syntax, the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics, and comparative and typological linguistics, as well as scholars interested in particular languages such as East Asian and Romance languages.

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics

Author: William S.-Y. Wang

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 793

ISBN-13: 0199856338

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The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the entire field from a multi-disciplinary perspective. All chapters are contributed by leading scholars in their respective areas. This Handbook contains eight sections: history, languages and dialects, language contact, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, socio-cultural aspects and neuro-psychological aspects. It provides not only a diachronic view of how languages evolve, but also a synchronic view of how languages in contact enrich each other by borrowing new words, calquing loan translation and even developing new syntactic structures. It also accompanies traditional linguistic studies of grammar and phonology with empirical evidence from psychology and neurocognitive sciences. In addition to research on the Chinese language and its major dialect groups, this handbook covers studies on sign languages and non-Chinese languages, such as the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan.