Audrey-Li Yen-hui - Böcker

The issue of how interpretation results from the form and type of syntactic structures present in language is one which is central and hotly debated in both theoretical and descriptive linguistics.This volume brings together a series of eleven new cutting-edge essays by leading experts in East Asian languages which shows how the study of formal structures and functional morphemes in Chinese, Japanese and Korean adds much to our general understanding of the close connections between form and interpretation. This specially commissioned collection will be of interest to linguists of all backgrounds working in the general area of syntax and language change, as well as those with a special interest in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Recent developments in generative grammar have been very stimulating. The current theory defines a small set of principles that apply to all human languages. Efforts have been made to demonstrate the adequacy of this theory for a wide range of languages. We thus see an interesting interface of theory and empirical data: the study of natural languages contributes to defining the properties of Universal Grammar and the predictions of the theory help in uncovering generalizations regarding natural languages. This book aims to add to this exciting development by showing how the analysis of Mandarin Chinese constituent structures helps to define Case Theory and how interesting generalizations concerning Chinese grammar are uncovered through verification of the theoretical predictions. Starting from the inadequacy of work by Koopman, Li, and Travis on the effect of Case directionality on word order, the book shows that a detailed study of Chinese constituent structures allows us to reduce the phrase structure component to a minimal statement concerning the position of the head in a given phrase. It argues that in a given language the constituent structures can be adequately captured by the interaction of Case Theory, Theta Theory, Government Theory, and X Theory. Long­ standing controversies concerning Chinese basic word order are resolved by showing that underlying word order generalizations can differ from surface word order generalizations.

This work is an introduction to the "state of the art" of Chinese linguistics, focusing especially on developments since the 1970s. Chinese is one of the few languages, outside of the languages of the Indo-European family, that have a long tradition of linguistic scholarship of their own. This tradition has continued to date and continues to bring new results, often with interesting (though unnoticed) consequences for linguistic theories developed in the West. The study of modern Chinese is characterized by attempts to understand the nature of Chinese in light of explicit linguistic theories and how the study may in turn help shape the future of mainstream linguistic theory. The ten chapters collected in this volume address a major area in both traditional and current theoretical research, as well as areas that represent newly cultivated frontiers in cognitive science: language diversity, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. This volume can be used both as a textbook for upper-division or graduate introduction to Chinese linguistics, and as a reference handbook for the linguist or general reader who would like to know about the current state of Chinese linguistic research.

The past decade and a half has witnessed a great deal of renewed interest in the study of Chinese linguistics, not only in the traditional areas of philological studies and in theoretically oriented areas of syn­ chronic grammar and language change but also in the cultivation of new frontiers in related areas of the cognitive sciences. There is a significant increase in the number of students studying one area or another of the linguistic structure of Chinese in various linguistic programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Several new academic departments devoted to the study of linguistics have been established in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years. The increasing research and study activities have also resulted in a number of national and international conferences, including the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which has been held annually in the United States; the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL), which has had its fourth meeting since it was launched by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1990; the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (lACL), created in Singapore in 1992 and now incorporated in Irvine, California, which has held its annual meetings at major institutions in Asia, Europe, and the US.

The issue of how interpretation results from the form and type of syntactic structures present in language is one which is central and hotly debated in both theoretical and descriptive linguistics.This volume brings together a series of eleven new cutting-edge essays by leading experts in East Asian languages which shows how the study of formal structures and functional morphemes in Chinese, Japanese and Korean adds much to our general understanding of the close connections between form and interpretation. This specially commissioned collection will be of interest to linguists of all backgrounds working in the general area of syntax and language change, as well as those with a special interest in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.