Chinese Linguistics: An Introduction

✍ Scribed by Giorgio Francesco Arcodia; Bianca Basciano

• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 358
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume provides a broad introduction to Chinese linguistics. It offers an accessible synthesis of the most relevant topics in the field both for researchers and scholars on China studies and for linguists, including those with little or no previous knowledge of Chinese.

✦ Table of Contents

Preface to the English edition
List of abbreviations
Periodization of Chinese history
1. Introduction
1.1 What is 'Chinese linguistics'?
1.2 Aims and scope of this book
1.3 Organization of this book
2. Sinitic languages: A historical and typological overview
2.1 'Chinese', 'dialects', and 'Sinitic languages'
2.2 A short history of Chinese
2.2.1 Language in pre-imperial China
2.2.2 The Qin unification, language, and writing
2.2.3 'Standard' varieties in imperial China
2.2.4 The birth of a national language
2.2.5 The periodization of Chinese
2.3 The classification of Sinitic languages
2.3.1 Sinitic languages: genealogy and typology
2.3.2 The structur of the Sinitic family
3. Chinese writing
3.1 Chinese characters
3.1.1 The classification of Chinese characters
3.1.2 Quantitative data
3.2 A short history of Chinese writing
3.2.1 Early attestations of writing in China
3.2.2 Writing in imperial China
3.2.3 Writing in republican China: phonetization vs simplification
3.3 Writing other languages
3.3.1 Writing Chinese dialects
3.3.2 The Chu Nom and Sawndip writing systems
4. The sounds of Chinese
4.1 Historical phonology
4.1.1 The reconstruction of earlier stages of Chinese
4.1.2 Old Chinese
4.1.3 Middle Chinese
4.1.4 Early Mandarin
4.2 The phonology of modern Sinitic languages
4.2.1 Modern Standard Chinese
4.2.2 Mandarin and Jin
4.2.3 Wu
4.2.4 Xiang
4.2.5 Gan
4.2.6 Hakka
4.2.7 Yue
4.2.8 Min
4.2.3 Hue, Pinghua, and unclassified patois
5. Morphology and the lexicon
5.1 The morphology of Chinese
5.1.1 Morphemes and words
5.1.2 Word formation in Old and Middle Chinese
5.1.3 Word formation in Premodern and Modern Chinese
5.1.3.1 Compounding
5.1.3.2 Derivation
5.1.3.3 Reduplication
5.1.3.4 Abbreviation
5.1.3.5 Nonconcatenative morphologt
5.2 Foreign words in the Chinese lexicon
5.2.1 The evolution of the lexicon after the Opium Wars
5.3 Recent trends in Chinese word formation
5.3.1 Chinese 'buzzwords' ( 流行語 liúxíngyǔ)
5.3.1 A case study: Chinese 客 -ke neologisms
5.4 On lexical differences among Sinitic languages
6. Topics in Chinese syntax
6.1 Word order
6.1.1 Word order in Old Chinese
6.1.2 Word order in Modern Chinese
6.1.3 Word order in Chinese dialects
6.2 Word order, subjecthood, and topichood
6.2.1 On the notion of 'subject' in Chinese
6.2.2 Some features of the topic in Chinese
6.3 Serial verb constructions
6.3.1 Serial verb constructions and grammaticalization
6.4 Tense and aspect
6.4.1 Lexical aspect
6.4.1.1 Aspect in resultative compounds
6.5 Argument structure: the case of resultative compounds
6.6 Word classes
6.6.1 Proposed criteria for establishing word classes in Chinese
6.6.1.1 Nouns and verbs
6.6.1.2 Adjectives
6.6.1.3 Prepositions
References
Index
Subject index