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This book is concerned with cross-linguistic contrast of major grammatical categories in English and Chinese, two most important yet genetically different world languages. This genetic difference has resulted in many subsidiary differences that are, among other things, related to grammar. Compared with typologically related languages, cross-linguistic contrast of English and Chinese is more challenging yet promising. The main theme of this book lies in its focus on cross-linguistic contrast of aspect-related grammatical categories, or, grammatical categories that contribute to aspectual meaning - both situation aspect at the semantic level and viewpoint aspect at the grammatical level - in English and Chinese.
The unique strength of this volume lies in that it is first corpus-based book contrasting English and Chinese. Given that the state of the art in language studies is to use corpora, the significance of the marriage between contrastive studies and the corpus methodology in this book is not to be underestimated.
List of contents
1. Introduction 2. Aspect Marking in English and Chinese 3. Temporal Adverbials and Telicity in English and Chinese 4. Quantifying Constructions in English and Chinese 5. Passives in English and Chinese 6. Negation in English and Chinese: Variants and Variations 7. Negation in English and Chinese: Special Usages 8. Challenge and Promise, and the Way Forward
About the author
Richard Xiao is Senior Lecturer in English and Chinese Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. He has published extensively in corpus linguistics as well as contrastive and translation studies. Richard's recent books include Aspect in Mandarin Chinese (2004), Corpus-Based Language Studies (2006), and A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (2009).
Tony McEnery is Professor of English Linguistics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University, UK. As a world renowned corpus linguist, he has published numerous books including Corpus Linguistics (1996/2001), Aspect in Mandarin Chinese (2004), Corpus-Based Language Studies (2006), and Corpora in Linguistics (2010).
Summary
This volume represents the first book-length corpus-based contrastive studies of major grammatical categories in English and Chinese, two most important yet distinctly different world languages in the 21st century, on the basis of large matching corpora of authentic spoken and written data in the two languages.
Additional text
"This book is no doubt a fascinating contribution to corpus linguistics, linguistic theory, and a cross-linguistic analysis of aspect-related grammatical categories of the two typologically dissimilar languages."
- Chinese Language and Dialogue, Vol 1:2 (2010)
