Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics – serie

This book conducts a thorough investigation of the variation in tone sandhi patterns of Shanghai and Wuxi Wu using quantitative rating experiments.

This book studies Chinese opposites. It uses a large corpus (GigaWord) to trace the behavior of opposite pairings’ co-occurrence, focusing on the following questions: In what types of constructions, from window-size restricted and bi-syllabic to quad-syllabic, will the opposite pairings appear together?

This book defines Chinese middle constructions as generic constructions, with their highest syntactically saturated argument always understood as an arbitrary one.

This book concerns two focus particles (jiu, dou) and wh-expressions (shenme = ‘what’, na geren = ‘which person’) in Mandarin Chinese. An idea based on alternatives and varieties of alternatives in particular – following Chierchia’s 2013 analysis of the polarity system – is pursued to account for the systematic ambiguities.

This book investigates the diachronic change of the tone sandhi of Southern Min Chinese, which is known for its synchronic arbitrariness and opacity. It argues that in final-prominent tone sandhi, the change of final tones and the change of non-final tones can be highly independent and essentially different from each other. Accordingly, it proposes a new position-based diachronic approach to study the separate evolution of tones occurring at different positions. This book is the first study to rigorously and systematically explore the diachrony of Southern Min tone sandhi.

This book presents new perspectives on the study of Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics.  Based on the international Workshop on Aspect and Modality in Chinese, the book includes the latest research findings in the field to make them available not only to specialists in Classical and Buddhist Chinese, but also to researchers and students of general linguistics and of the universals of language. It also discusses different aspects of the AM (Aspect-Modality) and the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Modality) system of Chinese. It provides a comprehensive overview of both of the universally related systems of aspect and modality. The first part of the book focuses on aspectual features of Chinese; these include basic studies on the syntactic representation of the aspectual structure of the verb phrase in Archaic Chinese, the aspectual function of different object constructions and their development, temporal features of the verb phrase, and the aspectual functions of nominalization processes. The second part includes articles highlighting different aspects of the modal system or the interplay between tense, aspect and modality in Chinese, including a survey on the history of studies on modality in Chinese and the modal and temporal aspectual/markers indicating future meanings, a specialized study on modal deontic verbs in the Buddhist Vinaya texts, the modal function of rhetorical questions in Buddhist Chinese, and a study on the diachronic development of the aspectual and modal system in Chinese.

Motion is one of the most basic human experiences, and it provides an important window for looking into human cognition and language. Within the paradigm of cognitive semantics, this book presents a comprehensive study of the conceptualization and linguistic representation of motion in Mandarin Chinese. It focuses on the correlation between the ways in which Mandarin speakers conceptualize motion events and the ways in which they render them and carefully considers the typological properties. In addition to deepening our understanding of motion cognition and expressions, this study also affords insights for L2 learning and teaching of motion in Chinese.

This book offers a laboratory phonological analysis of the sonority hierarchy and natural classes in nasal harmony using an artificial grammar-learning paradigm. It is aimed at postgraduate students and linguists in general whose research interests lie in phonology, phonetics, and/or  psycholinguistics. It is useful for linguists who are struggling to figure out how to effectively design an artificial phonological grammar and those who have not designed experiments on their own but would like to do so as an additional means to testing linguistic theories. This book is also a valuable resource for anyone building crosslinguistic artificial grammar paradigm resources.

This book investigates the diachronic change of the tone sandhi of Southern Min Chinese, which is known for its synchronic arbitrariness and opacity. It argues that in final-prominent tone sandhi, the change of final tones and the change of non-final tones can be highly independent and essentially different from each other.

This book studies Chinese opposites. It uses a large corpus (GigaWord) to trace the behavior of opposite pairings’ co-occurrence, focusing on the following questions: In what types of constructions, from window-size restricted and bi-syllabic to quad-syllabic, will the opposite pairings appear together?

This book defines Chinese middle constructions as generic constructions, with their highest syntactically saturated argument always understood as an arbitrary one.

This book concerns two focus particles (jiu, dou) and wh-expressions (shenme = ‘what’, na geren = ‘which person’) in Mandarin Chinese. An idea based on alternatives and varieties of alternatives in particular – following Chierchia’s 2013 analysis of the polarity system – is pursued to account for the systematic ambiguities.

This book conducts a thorough investigation of the variation in tone sandhi patterns of Shanghai and Wuxi Wu using quantitative rating experiments.

This book offers new perspectives on the study of Chinese lexical semantics, as well as discourse analysis and cognitive pragmatics based on lexical semantics.

This book offers new perspectives on the study of Chinese lexical semantics, as well as discourse analysis and cognitive pragmatics based on lexical semantics.

The intended readership includes, but is not limited to, graduate students in linguistics and researchers interested in Chinese linguistics in particular, and in lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics in general.

The intended readership includes, but is not limited to, graduate students in linguistics and researchers interested in Chinese linguistics in particular, and in lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics in general.

This book is a comprehensive study on the phonetic characteristics of citation tones in Chaoshan Chinese. This book not only provides a large-scale typological study on Chaoshan Chinese, but also offers a good example of how to figure out the evolutionary paths of tones from the perspective of variation.

This book is a comprehensive study on the phonetic characteristics of citation tones in Chaoshan Chinese. This book not only provides a large-scale typological study on Chaoshan Chinese, but also offers a good example of how to figure out the evolutionary paths of tones from the perspective of variation.

This book is a cutting-edge exploration of Chinese syntactic complexity by introducing a Chinese-language-specific approach, and providing a clear rationale and methodology for gauging syntactic complexity development along proficiency increase. It informs research and practice on assessment, proficiency scale and rubric descriptors, and task design for different language performances. This book appeals to a broad audience of researchers, not only those focused on Chinese and other Asian languages but also linguists, applied linguists, and language educators interested in understanding and measuring complexity.