Language Contact and Change in Chinese

✍ Scribed by Guangshun Cao (editor); Hsiao-jung Yu (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 266
• Series: Trends in Chinese Linguistics [TCL]; 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The book sheds light on the fascinating evolution of contact-induced grammatical features in Chinese syntax. For more than two thousand years, Chinese has been in large scale language contact with languages such as Sanskrit, Mongolian, and Manchurian. Originally published in Chinese in renowned academic journals, the contributions are made available for the first time to the English speaking world.

Tracing contact-induced features in Chinese from the 3rd century to the present day.

Second language acquisition is one of the key modes of language contact in history of the Chinese language.

✦ Table of Contents

Foreword
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Theory and fact – A study of the translated Buddhist scriptures of the Medieval Period from the perspective of language contact
On the origin of the Chinese reflexive ziji from the perspective of the Medieval Chinese Buddhist scriptures
The origin and development of negative exclusive particles in the Chinese language
The postpositions suo 所 and bian 边 in translated Chinese Buddhist scriptures of the Medieval Period
Variant reduplication and four-character state adjectives in Yuan Zaju
The correlation between the Chinese purpose construction “VP + qu (去, ‘go’)” and SOV languages
On the Han’er Yanyu of the Yuan Dynasty
A study of the special syntactic features in Yuan baihua
On the special syntactic features in the vernacular imperial edicts of the early Ming Dynasty (1368–1424)
The influence of language contact on word order of some minority languages in Southern China
Second language acquisition and contactinduced language change in the history of the Chinese language
Postscript
Index