New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax

New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax
Author: Waltraud Paul
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2014-12-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110338777

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.

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
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2018-12-28
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9811319480

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.

Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective

Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective
Author: Yen-hui Audrey Li
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2015
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0199945675

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

New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning

New Perspectives on Transfer in Second Language Learning
Author: Liming Yu
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2015-10-09
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1783094354

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation
Author: Chris Shei
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 791
Release: 2017-10-16
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1317383028

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation presents expert and new research in analysing and solving translation problems centred on the Chinese language in translation. The Handbook includes both a review of and a distinctive approach to key themes in Chinese translation, such as translatability and equivalence, extraction of collocation, and translation from parallel and comparable corpora. In doing so, it undertakes to synthesise existing knowledge in Chinese translation, develops new frameworks for analysing Chinese translation problems, and explains translation theory appropriate to the Chinese context. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Translation is an essential reference work for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars actively researching in this area.

The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics

The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
Author: C. T. James Huang
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 694
Release: 2018-03-20
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1119457076

The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics is the first comprehensive introduction to Chinese linguistics from the perspective of modern theoretical and formal linguistics. Containing twenty-five chapters, the book offers a balanced, accessible and thoughtfully organized introduction to some of the most important results of research into Chinese linguistics carried out by theoretical linguists during the last thirty years. Presenting critical overviews of a wide range of major topics, it is the first to meet the great demand for an overview volume on core areas of Chinese linguistics. Authoritative contributions describe and assess the major achievements and controversies of research undertaken in each area, and provide bibliographies for further reading. The contributors refer both to their own work in relevant fields, and objectively present a range of competitor theories and analyses, resulting in a volume that is fully comprehensive in its coverage of theoretical research into Chinese linguistics in recent years. This unique Handbook is suitable both as a primary reader for structured, taught courses on Chinese linguistics at university level, and for individual study by graduates and other professional linguists.

New Perspectives on the Origins of Language

New Perspectives on the Origins of Language
Author: Claire Lefebvre
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027271135

The question of how language emerged is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in science. In recent years, a strong resurgence of interest in the emergence of language from an evolutionary perspective has been helped by the convergence of approaches, methods, and ideas from several disciplines. The selection of contributions in this volume highlight scenarios of language origin and the prerequisites for a faculty of language based on biological, historical, social, cultural, and paleontological forays into the conditions that brought forth and favored language emergence, augmented by insights from sister disciplines. The chapters all reflect new speculation, discoveries and more refined research methods leading to a more focused understanding of the range of possibilities and how we might choose among them. There is much that we do not yet know, but the outlines of the path ahead are ever clearer.

The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
Author: Chu-Ren Huang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 883
Release: 2022-08-18
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1108349668

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.

Chinese Grammar at Work

Chinese Grammar at Work
Author: Shuanfan Huang
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2013-12-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027271364

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.

Chinese Linguistics

Chinese Linguistics
Author: Giorgio Francesco Arcodia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2022-03
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0198847831

Presents a directory of WWW resources on Chinese linguistics, compiled by the East Asian Libraries Cooperative. Links to resources on phonetics, grammar, and dialects. Provides access to online courses, journals, and academic organizations.