SubjectsLinguistics / Sino-Tibetan languages
Book series
ISSN 1382-3485
Journals
Asian Languages and Linguistics
Edited by Danqing Liu, Ailan Fu and Gong Cheng
ISSN 2665-9336 | E‑ISSN 2665‑9344
Chinese Language and Discourse
An International and Interdisciplinary Journal
Edited by Xiaoting Li, K.K. Luke, Hongyin Tao and Li Wei
ISSN 1877-7031 | E‑ISSN 1877‑8798
Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報)
The journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA
Edited by Shuai Li
ISSN 2451-828X | E‑ISSN 2451‑8298
International Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Edited by Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai, Ning Yu and Hongming Zhang
ISSN 2213-8706 | E‑ISSN 2213‑8714
Basilio Brollo’s Dictionarium sinico-latinum (Chinese-Latin dictionary): A critical edition of the manuscript Rinuccini 22 (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana)
Gabriele Tola
This publication is the first and long-awaited critical edition of the Dictionarium sinico-latinum (Chinese-Latin dictionary) by the Franciscan missionary Basilio Brollo (1648–1704; Chinese name, Ye Zunxiao 葉尊孝). This publication thoroughly researches for the first time a lexicographical milestone,… read more
The Development of the Chinese Cleft Construction: A diachronic constructional approach
Fangqiong Zhan
This book explores the development of the Chinese cleft construction through the lens of Diachronic Construction Grammar. Focusing on shi as an invariant copula, it examines the VP de cleft, the V de O cleft, and the bare shi cleft, showing how each signals contrastive and specificational meaning.… read more[Constructional Approaches to Language, 41] 2026. xviii, 207 pp.
A Linguistic Comparison of Chinese and English: Structural, functional, and typological perspectives
Chao Li
The book examines similarities and differences between Chinese and English from structural, functional, and typological perspectives. The linguistic comparison undertaken covers various aspects of the two languages, including, for example, typological features, the phonological system, the writing… read more[Studies in Language Companion Series, 239] 2026. xv, 399 pp.
Perspectives on Chinese Language Acquisition
Edited by Henghua Su
Special issue of International Journal of Chinese Linguistics 12:2 (2025) v, 170 pp.
Proper Names
Edited by Chia-Jung Pan and Yang Huang
Special issue of Asian Languages and Linguistics 6:1 (2025) v, 252 pp.
Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in the Era of AI Technology: Literature, film and culture
Edited by Jing Wang
Special issue of Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報) 60:1 (2025) v, 77 pp.
Missionary Grammars and Dictionaries of Chinese: The contribution of seventeenth century Spanish Dominicans
Otto Zwartjes
This monograph aims to shed light on the linguistic endeavors and educational practices employed by 17th century Spanish Dominicans in their efforts to understand and disseminate knowledge of the Chinese language during this historical period. Ample attention is dedicated to the evolution of… read more[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 131] 2024. xii, 381 pp.
Seeking Changes in a Challenging Time: New perspectives for proficiency-oriented Chinese teaching and beyond
Edited by Yu Liu, Qiaona Yu and Yu Wu
Special issue of Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報) 59:2 (2024) v, 153 pp.
Teacher-Student Engagement Patterns in CSL Classrooms and Beyond: Video-based multimodal analyses
Edited by Hongyin Tao and Yan Zhou
Special issue of Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報) 59:3 (2024) v, 173 pp.
Translanguaging and Multimodality
Edited by Qi Zhang
Special issue of Chinese Language and Discourse 15:2 (2024) v, 138 pp.
The Unit of Processing in Chinese
Edited by Tianlin Wang
Special issue of International Journal of Chinese Linguistics 11:1 (2024) v, 149 pp.
The Unity of Movement: Evidence from verb movement in Cantonese
Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee
Displacement (of linguistic expressions) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural language. In the generative tradition, displacement is modelled in terms of transformation, or more precisely, movement, which establishes dependencies among syntactic constituents in a phrase structure. This book probes… read more[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 283] 2024. xxii, 214 pp.
Wh-island Effects in Chinese: A formal experimental study
Xu Chen
This book examines three controversial generalizations concerning wh-island effects in Chinese: argument and adjunct asymmetry, subject and object asymmetry, and D-linked and non-D-linked asymmetry. Experiments under the factorial definition of island effects reveal that: (1) both argument and… read more[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 282] 2024. xix, 173 pp.
Degrees and Grammar: An East Asian Perspective
Edited by Qiongpeng Luo, Zhiguo Xie and Xiao Li
Ethnolinguistic contact across the Indo-Myanmar-Southwestern China mountains
Edited by Alexander R. Coupe, Randy J. LaPolla and Hideo Sawada
Special issue of Asian Languages and Linguistics 4:2 (2023) v, 218 pp.
Fictive questions in the Zhuangzi: A cognitive rhetorical study
Mingjian Xiang
Rhetoric is intimately related to interaction and cognition. This book explores the cognitive underpinnings of rhetoric by presenting a case study of the rhetorical use of interactional structures, namely expository questions and rhetorical questions, in the classical Chinese tradition. Such… read more[Figurative Thought and Language, 18] 2023. xiii, 206 pp.
From Theory to Practice: Adopting the Chinese proficiency grading standards for international Chinese language education in North America
Edited by Jie Zhang and Ye Tian
Special issue of Chinese as a Second Language (漢語教學研究—美國中文教師學會學報) 58:2 (2023) v, 102 pp.
Lexical semantics towards the big-data era
Edited by Meichun Liu and Chunyu Kit
Special issue of Chinese Language and Discourse 14:1 (2023) v, 207 pp.
Cantonese GIVE and Double-Object Construction: Grammaticalization and word order change
Andy Chi-on Chin
GIVE is a versatile morpheme in many languages. While there have been extensive studies on the interplay between the syntax and semantics of GIVE in many languages, not much has been done in a similar manner on Cantonese, a member of the Yue dialect group of the Chinese language family. This… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 15] 2022. xiv, 266 pp.
Classifiers
Edited by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Special issue of Asian Languages and Linguistics 3:2 (2022) v, 227 pp.
Introducing Chinese Linguistics: A handbook for Chinese language teachers and learners
Hang Zhang and Lan Zhang
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the fundamentals of Chinese linguistics, including the core components of phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, writing system, and social cultural aspects of the language. It also discusses key features of Chinese language acquisition in… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 16] 2022. xx, 283 pp.
Media Language and Discourse in Cultural China
Edited by Doreen D. Wu, Ming Liu and David C.S. Li
Special issue of Chinese Language and Discourse 13:1 (2022) v, 165 pp.
New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax: Studies in honor of Yen-Hui Audrey Li
Edited by Andrew Simpson
This volume brings together 19 cutting edge studies written by some of the most prominent linguists working on Chinese formal syntax, as a Festschrift volume dedicated to Yen-Hui Audrey Li. The contributions to the volume address a wide range of issues currently developing in the field of Chinese… read more[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 272] 2022. vi, 577 pp.
The Syllable and its Prosody in Chinese
Edited by Lian-Hee Wee, Feng Wang and Yuan Liang
The Joint Production of Conversational Turns
Edited by K.K. Luke and Mei Fang
Special issue of Chinese Language and Discourse 12:1 (2021) v, 134 pp.
Language, Multimodal Interaction and Transaction: Studies of a Southern Chinese marketplace
Xuehua Xiang
Xuehua Xiang examines multimodal interaction in the marketplace in a multilingual town at the juncture of urbanization in Southern China. Using a collection of data that span nearly 20 years from ethnographic fieldwork, Language, Multimodal Interaction and Transaction: Studies of a Southern Chinese… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 14] 2021. xii, 217 pp.
Analysing Chinese Language and Discourse across Layers and Genres
Edited by Wei Wang
Aspirational and expanding, this book examines contemporary Chinese language and discourse across a spectrum of linguistic layers and genres in diverse social contexts. Addressing issues ranging from the usual focus on language per se, or language use in reaction to the immediate settings, to the… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 13] 2020. xiii, 233 pp.
Cognitive Linguistics and the Study of Chinese
Edited by Dingfang Shu, Hui Zhang and Lifei Zhang
Bringing together contributions from a group of prominent researchers, within a cognitive-linguistic framework, this volume sheds light on linguistic structures and usages characteristic of the Chinese language, including noun-verb inclusion, the conceptual spatialization of actions, existential… read more[Human Cognitive Processing, 67] 2019. xv, 313 pp.
Conversation Analysis in Chinese: Part II
Edited by Ni-Eng Lim
Special issue of Chinese Language and Discourse 10:2 (2019) v, 175 pp.
Current Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse: Global context and diverse perspectives
Edited by Yun Xiao and Linda Tsung
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… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 10] 2019. xi, 298 pp.
Encoding Motion Events in Mandarin Chinese: A cognitive functional study
Jingxia Lin
This book is a corpus-based description and discussion of how Modern Mandarin Chinese encodes motion events, with a focus on how the distribution of verbal motion morphemes is closely associated with the meanings they lexicalize. The book is not only the first work that proposes a finer-grained… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 11] 2019. xvii, 209 pp.
Patient-Subject Constructions in Mandarin Chinese: Syntax, semantics, discourse
Xiaoling He
As a distinctive syntactic structure in Mandarin Chinese, the Patient-Subject Construction (PSC) is one of the most interesting but least well-understood structures in the language. This book offers a comprehensive account of the history, structure, meaning and use of the PSC. Unlike previous… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 12] 2019. xi, 204 pp.
Sound, Form, and Meaning of Chinese Dialects
Edited by Ik-sang Eom
The interface of semantics & etymology, morpho-syntax, and pragmatics in Chinese
Edited by Jeeyoung Peck
“Self” in Language, Culture, and Cognition
Yanying Lu
This book explores socio-cultural meanings of ‘self’ in the Chinese language through analysing a range of conversations among Chinese immigrants to Australia qualitatively on the topics of individuality, social relationships and collective identity. If language, culture and cognition are major… read more
Directional Particles in Cantonese: Form, function, and grammaticalization
Winnie Chor
This book is the first on Cantonese that deals with the grammaticalization phenomenon systematically. Focusing on a group of twelve directional particles, this book tracks their grammaticalization pathways from full-fledged directional verbs, to directional particles indicating meanings relating to… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 9] 2018. xvii, 239 pp.
Explicitation in Consecutive Interpreting
Fang Tang
Explicitation has been studied as a Translation Universal in corpus-based translation studies by several scholars, yet its features in interpreting have only been mildly touched upon. Given the obvious differences between translation and interpreting, it is worthwhile exploring whether… read more[Benjamins Translation Library, 135] 2018. xxi, 238 pp.
Pragmatic Transfer and Development: Evidence from EFL learners in China
Wei Li
Email has become a ubiquitous medium of communication. It is used amongst people from the same speech community, but also between people from different language and cultural backgrounds. When people communicate, they tend to follow rules of speaking in their native language, termed by scholars as… read more[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 287] 2018. xv, 268 pp.
Pivotal Constructions in Chinese: Diachronic, synchronic, and constructional perspectives
Rui Peng
This book presents a detailed analysis of the Chinese pivotal constructions (PVCs) and their diachronic developments from a constructionalist perspective, with the focus on the growth of the constructional hierarchies of these constructions and the changes with respect to both the form and meaning… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 8] 2017. xix, 243 pp.
Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In honor of Stephen Crain
Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, Yi-ching Su and Aijun Huang
This book focuses on important methodological and theoretical issues in Chinese and Japanese L1 and L2 acquisition. All contributions discuss experiments using the Truth Value Judgment Task (TVJT), on three syntactic and semantic domains, binding, scope interaction, and wh- and logical expressions.… read more[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 60] 2017. vi, 286 pp.
The Acquisition of L2 Mandarin Prosody: From experimental studies to pedagogical practice
Chunsheng Yang
This book examines the acquisition of L2 Mandarin prosody, a less explored area in SLA. While acknowledging that tone acquisition is one of the most important aspects in acquiring L2 Mandarin phonology, the book demonstrates that phrase- and utterance-level prosody is equally important.… read more[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition, 1] 2016. xviii, 175 pp.
Conversation Analysis in Chinese
Edited by Sandra A. Thompson and Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu
Special issue of Chinese Language and Discourse 7:2 (2016) v, 166 pp.
Displaying Recipiency: Reactive tokens in Mandarin task-oriented interaction
Jun Xu
This book is intended to address students, researchers and teachers of spoken language. It presents an empirical study of task-oriented language data in which coparticipants display levels of recipiency through reactive tokens. An in-depth investigation of displaying recipiency is of interest… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 6] 2016. xvii, 198 pp.
Integrating Chinese Linguistic Research and Language Teaching and Learning
Edited by Hongyin Tao
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. read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 7] 2016. xviii, 239 pp.
Interrogative Strategies: An areal typology of the languages of China
Tianhua Luo
This book deals with how to ask questions in the languages of China. The syntactic, morphological, and lexical forms for distinguishing interrogatives take centre stage; intonation is also dealt with, but more peripherally than question particles, disjunctive and negative constructions, and word… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 5] 2016. xiii, 252 pp.
Introduction to Healthcare for Chinese-speaking Interpreters and Translators
Ineke H.M. Crezee and Eva N.S. Ng
This book is based on the very popular international publication (Crezee, 2013) and has been supplemented with Chinese glossaries. Just like the 2013 textbook, this practical resource will allow interpreters and translators to quickly read up on healthcare settings, familiarizing themselves with… read more[Not in series, 202] 2016. xxvii, 412 pp.
Contemporary Chinese Discourse and Social Practice in China
Edited by Linda Tsung and Wei Wang
Significant socio-political changes in China have had great impact on Chinese discourse. Changes to the discourse have become an increasing focus of scholarship. This book examines contemporary Chinese discourse and social practice in China with a focus on the role that language plays in the… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 4] 2015. xvi, 223 pp.
A Grammar of Mandarin
Jeroen Wiedenhof
A fascinating description of a global language, A Grammar of Mandarin combines broad perspectives with illuminating depth. Crammed with examples from everyday conversations, it aims to let the language speak for itself. The book opens with an overview of the language situation and a thorough… read more[Not in series, 197] 2015. xxv, 477 pp.
The Semantics of Chinese Music: Analysing selected Chinese musical concepts
Adrian Tien
Music is a widely enjoyed human experience. It is, therefore, natural that we have wanted to describe, document, analyse and, somehow, grasp it in language. This book surveys a representative selection of musical concepts in Chinese language, i.e. words that describe, or refer to, aspects of… read more[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts, 5] 2015. xv, 303 pp.
Current Trends in Chinese Discourse
Edited by Wei Wang and Linda Tsung
Special issue of Chinese Language and Discourse 5:1 (2014) v, 97 pp.
Development of Pragmatic and Discourse Skills in Chinese-Speaking Children
Edited by Zhu Hua and Lixian Jin
For many years, studies of the development of pragmatic and discourse skills in young children have predominantly focused on English and other European languages, as with the field of child language development in general. This volume, originally published in Chinese Language and Discourse 3:1… read more[Benjamins Current Topics, 60] 2014. v, 134 pp.
Discourse, Politics and Media in Contemporary China
Edited by Qing Cao, Hailong Tian and Paul Chilton
After three and a half decades of economic reforms, radical changes have occurred in all aspects of life in China. In an authoritarian society, these changes are mediated significantly through the power of language, carefully controlled by the political elites. Discourse, as a way of speaking and… read more
Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities: Many pathways to being Chinese
Edited by Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen and Andy Hancock
This book brings together new theoretical perspectives and bilingual education models from different sociopolitical and cultural contexts across the globe in order to address the importance of sociocultural, educational and linguistic environments that create, enhance or limit the ways in which… read more[AILA Applied Linguistics Series, 12] 2014. xv, 243 pp.
Multimodality, Interaction and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation
Xiaoting Li
One major feature of conversation is that people take turns to speak. Based on audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation, this book explores the role of syntax, prosody, body movements as well as their interplay in turn organization in the temporal unfolding of action… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 3] 2014. xi, 265 pp.
Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese: Revised edition
Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor
The book describes how the three East Asian writing systems-Chinese, Korean, and Japanese- originated, developed, and are used today. Uniquely, this book: (1) examines the three East Asian scripts (and English) together in relation to each other, and (2) discusses how these scripts are, and… read more[Studies in Written Language and Literacy, 14] 2014. xix, 487 pp.
Chinese Grammar at Work
Shuanfan Huang
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… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 1] 2013. xii, 458 pp.
Chinese Language Narration: Culture, cognition, and emotion
Edited by Allyssa McCabe and Chien-ju Chang
Chinese Language Narration: Culture, cognition, and emotion is a collection of papers presenting original research on narration in Mandarin, especially as it contrasts to what is known regarding narration in English. One chapter addresses dinner table conversation between Chinese immigrant parents… read more[Studies in Narrative, 19] 2013. viii, 213 pp.
Increased Empiricism: Recent advances in Chinese Linguistics
Edited by Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
Increased Empiricism: Recent advances in Chinese Linguistics showcases recent trends in the co-development of theory and empiricism in Chinese linguistics. The volume tackles a wide range of theoretical and empirical problems in multiple subfields including sociolinguistics, discourse analysis,… read more[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 2] 2013. ix, 317 pp.
Development of Pragmatic and Discourse Skills in Chinese-Speaking Children
Edited by Zhu Hua and Lixian Jin
Special issue of Chinese Language and Discourse 3:1 (2012) v, 127 pp.
Cultural China in Discursive Transformation
Edited by Shi-xu
Special issue of Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 21:2 (2011) 160 pp.
Interpreting Chinese, Interpreting China
Edited by Robin Setton
China’s emergence has generated a wave of interest in interpreting and interpreter training. First published as a Special Issue of Interpreting (11:2, 2009) this collection of papers by six leading researchers from the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas, some based on recent PhDs,… read more[Benjamins Current Topics, 29] 2011. viii, 188 pp.
From Body to Meaning in Culture: Papers on cognitive semantic studies of Chinese
Ning Yu
From the perspective of Cognitive Semantics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this collection of papers looks at the relationship between language, body, culture, and cognition. In particular, it looks into the embodied nature of human language and cognition as arising from and situated in the… read more[Not in series, 149] 2009. xvi, 310 pp.
Aspect in Burmese: Meaning and function
Nicoletta Romeo
The book presents an overview of the aspectual system of Burmese, and it focuses on the analysis and description of the meaning and function of some aspectual markers which are among the most commonly used in the language. The analysis highlights a few important facts. Firstly, these markers, which… read more[Studies in Language Companion Series, 96] 2008. xv, 289 pp.
Request Strategies: A comparative study in Mandarin Chinese and Korean
Yong-Ju Rue and Grace Zhang
This book investigates request strategies in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and is one of the first attempts to address cross-cultural strategies employed in the speech act of requests in two non-Western languages. The data, drawn from role-plays and naturally recorded conversations, complement each… read more[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 177] 2008. xv, 320 pp.
Shaping Minds: A discourse analysis of Chinese-language community mental health literature
Guy Ramsay
Mental illness is an increasing concern of government health services across the globe. It is timely, therefore, that community education about mental illness is subject to discourse analysis. Shaping Minds explores how the psychoeducational message is presented to Chinese-speaking audiences in… read more[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 32] 2008. ix, 149 pp.
The Chinese Rime Tables: Linguistic philosophy and historical-comparative phonology
Edited by David Prager Branner
This book, the first in its field in a Western language, examines China’s native phonological tool with regard to reconstruction, theory, and linguistic philosophy.After an introductory essay on the nature of the tables and the history of their interpretation, the book concentrates on three areas:… read more[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 271] 2006. viii, 358 pp.
Dramatized Discourse: The Mandarin Chinese ba-construction
Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
Language is a symbolic system of meanings evoked by linguistic forms. The choice of forms in communication is non-arbitrary. Rather, speakers pick those forms whose meanings best convey their discourse intention. The meaning of the Mandarin ba-construction, argues Jing-Schmidt, is discourse… read more[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 56] 2005. xxii, 337 pp.
Written Communication across Cultures: A sociocognitive perspective on business genres
Yunxia Zhu
Winner of ABC's award for Distinguished Publication for 2006This book explores effective written communication across cultures both theoretically and practically. Specifically it conceptualizes cross-cultural genre study and compares English and Chinese business writing collected from Australia,… read more[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 141] 2005. xviii, 216 pp.
Aspect in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based study
Richard Xiao † and Tony McEnery
Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of… read more[Studies in Language Companion Series, 73] 2004. x, 305 pp.
Spatial Demonstratives in English and Chinese: Text and Cognition
Yi’an Wu
As a subject of universal appeal, spatial demonstratives have been studied extensively from a variety of disciplines. What marks the present study as distinct is that it is an English-Chinese comparative study set in a cognitive-linguistic framework and that the methodology features a parallel… read more[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 126] 2004. xviii, 234 pp.
Stance in Talk: A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles
Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu
Guided by the methodology of conversation analysis (CA), this book explores how participants in Mandarin conversation display stance in the unfolding development of action and interaction, and, in particular, how this is accomplished through the use of two Mandarin final particles. Through a close… read more[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 117] 2004. xvi, 260 pp.
Intercultural Conversation
Winnie Cheng
This innovative study of naturally-occurring English conversations between Hong Kong Chinese and their native English friends and colleagues makes a worthwhile contribution to the research literature on intercultural conversation. Through analyzing dyadic intercultural conversations, the study… read more[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 118] 2003. xii, 279 pp.
The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar: The formation of the resultative construction and its effects
Yuzhi Shi
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… read more[Studies in Language Companion Series, 59] 2002. xiv, 262 pp.
Francisco Varo's Grammar of the Mandarin Language (1703): An English translation of ‘Arte de la lengua Mandarina’. With an Introduction by Sandra Breitenbach
W. South Coblin and Joseph A. Levi
Francisco Varo’s Arte de la Lengua Mandarina, completed ca. 1680, is the earliest published grammar of any spoken form of Chinese and the fullest known description of the standard language of the seventeenth century. It establishes beyond doubt that this “Language of the Mandarins” was not… read more[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 93] 2000. liv, 282 pp.
Chinese Dialect Classification: A comparative approach to Harngjou, Old Jintarn, and Common Northern Wu
Richard VanNess Simmons
This volume is an investigation and classification of dialects along the Wu and Jiang-Hwai Mandarin border in China's eastern Yangtze Valley. It is the first monograph-length study to critically question the traditional single criterion of initial voicing for the classification of Wu dialects and… read more[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 188] 1999. xviii, 317 pp.
The Roots of Old Chinese
Laurent Sagart
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… read more[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 184] 1999. xi, 255 pp.
Tibetan
Philip Denwood
The Tibetan language comprises a wide range of spoken and written varieties whose known history dates from the 7th century AD to the present day. Its speakers inhabit a vast area in Central Asia and the Himalayas extending into seven modern nation states, while its abundant literature includes much… read more[London Oriental and African Language Library, 3] 1999. xix, 372 pp.
The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: A perspective from Chinese
Ning Yu
This comparative study of Chinese and English metaphor contributes to the search for metaphoric universals by placing the contemporary theory of metaphor in a broad cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. The author explores to what degree abstract reasoning is metaphorical and which… read more[Human Cognitive Processing, 1] 1998. x, 278 pp.
Learnability and the Lexicon: Theories and second language acquisition research
Alan Juffs
This book provides a critical review of recent theories of semantics-syntax correspondences and makes new proposals for constraints on semantic structure relevant to syntax. Data from several languages are presented which suggest that semantic structure in root morphemes is subject to parametric… read more[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 12] 1996. xi, 277 pp.
Units in Mandarin Conversation: Prosody, discourse, and grammar
Hongyin Tao
This book provides a new way of studying grammar. The basic thrust of the book is to investigate grammar based on a prosodic unit, the intonation unit (IU), in spontaneous speech. The author challenges the dominant practice in the study of syntax, which has been to focus on the unit of the… read more[Studies in Discourse and Grammar, 5] 1996. xvi, 226 pp.
Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese
Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor
Chinese, Japanese, South (and North) Koreans in East Asia have a long, intertwined and distinguished cultural history and have achieved, or are in the process of achieving, spectacular economic success. Together, these three peoples make up one quarter of the world population.They use a variety of… read more[Studies in Written Language and Literacy, 3] 1995. xiii, 412 pp.
Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation
K.K. Luke
Utterance particles, also known as modal particles or sentence-final particles, form a class of words in Cantonese which is of great descriptive and theoretical interest to students of language. Most utterance particles do not have any semantic content (truth-conditional meaning), and few can be… read more[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 9] 1990. xvi, 329 pp.
Tibeto-Burman Tonology: A Comparative Analysis
Alfons Weidert
This monograph lays the foundation for a prosodological theory of Tibeto-Burman languages within a comparative and reconstructional framework. It is primarily based on data collections of mostly unknown languages on which the author worked for more than 10 years on several projects. This… read more[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 54] 1987. xvii, 512 pp.
Componential Analysis of Lushai Phonology
Alfons Weidert
The aim of this essay is to present a phonological analysis of Lushai, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Mizoram province of India, in terms of componential features applying – as mutation rules – to the morphophonological level. An analysis of this nature becomes possible if the concepts of… read more[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2] 1975. xiv, 139 pp.