Father Iakinf Bičurin’s theory of mental inflection in Chinese
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
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Bibliography