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Illustrated with a wide range of examples from every stage of the development of the language, this pioneering book provides an evolutionary perspective on the history of Chinese grammar. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of Asian linguistics, historical linguistics and syntactic theory.
List of contents
Conventions used in the examples; Abbreviations and symbols; 1. Some preliminaries; 2. Copular word and construction; 3. Focus and wh-word; 4. Serial verb construction; 5. Disyllabification; 6. Resultative construction; 7. Information structure; 8. Passive construction; 9. Disposal construction; 10. Verb copying and reduplication; 11. Comparative construction; 12. Ditransitive construction; Aspect and tense; 14. Negotiation; 15. Boundedness of predicate; 16. Classifier; 17. Demonstratives from classifiers; 18. Distal demonstratives from phonological derivation; 19. Pronouns, plurals and diminutives; 20. Structural particles; 21. Word order and relative clause; 22. Conclusions.
About the author
Yuzhi Shi is Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. He obtained an MA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1995 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, in 1999. His major publications include Motivations and Mechanisms of Grammaticalization in Chinese (Peking University Press, 2006), Chinese Grammar (The Commercial Press in Peking, 2010) and The Historical Morpho-Syntax of Chinese, which won the Prize of China Excellent Publications in 2016.
Summary
Illustrated with a wide range of examples from every stage of the development of the language, this pioneering book provides an evolutionary perspective on the history of Chinese grammar. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of Asian linguistics, historical linguistics and syntactic theory.
Foreword
A study of the motivations, mechanisms and regularities in the evolutionary history of Chinese grammar over the past three millennia.
