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Article published In:
Historiographia Linguistica
Vol. 47:2/3 (2020) ► pp.169–187

Father Iakinf Bičurin’s theory of mental inflection in Chinese

| Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow

The article deals with the highly original idea of mental inflection [умственное словоизменение] in Chinese put forward by the prominent nineteenth-century Russian sinologist Nikita (比丘林, Father Iakinf or Hyacinthus) Bičurin (1777–1853) in his Kitajskaja Grammatika (1835) and other language-related works. The concept refers to the internal features of Chinese morphology which compensate for the absence of common grammatical inflection. Fostered in an Humboldtian spirit, the theory established a link between covert categories and their surface representations a century before functional syntax appeared on the linguistic stage.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The essence of Bičurin’s theory of mental inflection
  • 3.The origins of the theory of mental inflection
  • 4.The theoretical background to mental inflection
  • 5.Mental inflection and twentieth-century functional syntax
  • 6.In conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
Published online: 24 February 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.00069.koz
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