A Discourse Grammar of Mandarin Chinese focuses on the relationships between clauses in Mandarin Chinese in the functional framework. Underlying these relationships are notions like modality, presupposition, topicality, and information structure, encoded by such devices as conjunction, aspect, topic, «sentence»-particles and subordination. Chauncey Chu devotes a chapter to each of these devices, with a view to discovering their contribution to the coherent organization of Chinese discourse. These devices are finally integrated into a network, culminating in a proposal of «the discourse sentence» (represented by SENTENCE) to replace the syntactically and/or semantically defined «traditional» sentence. The organization of SENTENCES into paragraphs also is discussed in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory.

Language is a symbolic system of meanings evoked by linguistic forms. The choice of forms in communication is non-arbitrary. Rather, speakers pick those forms whose meanings best convey their discourse intention. The meaning of the Mandarin ba-construction, argues Jing-Schmidt, is discourse dramaticity, a concept that includes high conceptual salience and subjectivity. The ba-construction and its "syntactic variations" are never interchangeable because contrast in their meanings determines difference in their functions. Quantitative analyses based on authentic data validate the postulation of discourse dramaticity. By taking discourse pragmatics seriously, the dramaticity hypothesis enables a unitary explanation that transcends sentence grammar. The diachronic treatment reveals the syntactic change of the ba-construction as an adaptive process of pragmatization, which raises the issue of linguistic evolution as a result of socio-cultural development. This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the interaction between grammar and pragmatics and to teachers confronting the controversy of the ba-construction in foreign language pedagogy.

Chinese Grammar at Work adopts a cognitive-functional approach and uses a corpus-based methodology to examine how Chinese syntax emerges from natural discourse context and what the evolving grammar at work looks like. In this volume the author weaves together an array of fresh perspectives on clause structure, constructions, interactional linguistics, cognitive science and complex dynamic systems to construct a grammar of spoken Chinese. The volume contains discussions of a large number of topics: contiguity relation, the roles of repair strategies in the shaping of constituent structure, non-canonical word order constructions, pragmatics of referring expressions, classifier constructions, noun-modifying constructions, verb complementation, ethnotheory of the person and constructions specific to the language of emotion, sequential sensitivity of linguistic materials, meaning potential in interaction, the nature of variability and stability in Chinese syntax from the perspective of complexity theory. The result is a volume that highlights the connections between language structure, situated and embodied nature of cognition and language use, and affords a true entrée to the exciting realm of Chinese grammar.

Chinese is a discourse-oriented language and the underlying mechanisms of the language involve encoding and decoding so the language can be correctly delivered and understood. To date, there has been a lack of consolidation at the discourse level such that a reference framework for understanding the language in a top-down fashion is still underdeveloped. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis is the first to showcase the latest research in the field of Chinese discourse analysis to consolidate existing findings, put the language in both theoretical and socio-functional perspectives, offer guidance and insights for further research and inspire innovative ideas for exploring the Chinese language in the discourse domain. The book is aimed at both students and scholars researching in the areas of Chinese linguistics and discourse analysis.

This reference grammar provides, for the first time, a description of the grammar of Mandarin Chinese, the official spoken language of China and Taiwan, in functional terms, focusing on the role and meanings of word-level and sentence-level structures in actual conversations.

A Reference Grammar of Chinese is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the linguistic structure of Chinese, covering all of the important linguistic features of the language and incorporating insights gained from research in Chinese linguistics over the past thirty years. With contributions from twenty-two leading Chinese linguists, this authoritative guide uses large-scale corpora to provide authentic examples based on actual language use. The accompanying online example databases ensure that a wide range of exemplars are readily available and also allow for new usages to be updated. This design offers a new paradigm for a reference grammar where generalizations can be cross-checked with additional examples and also provide resources for both linguistic studies and language learning. Featuring bilingual term lists, this reference grammar helps readers to access relevant literature in both English and Chinese and is an invaluable reference for learners, teachers and researchers in Chinese linguistics and language processing.

Francisco Varo’s Arte de la Lengua Mandarina, completed ca. 1680, is the earliest published grammar of any spoken form of Chinese and the fullest known description of the standard language of the seventeenth century. It establishes beyond doubt that this “Language of the Mandarins” was not Pekingese or Peking-based but had instead a Jiang-Huai or Nankingese-like phonology. It also provides important information about the nature and formation of pre-modern standard forms of Chinese and will lead to revisions of currently held views on Chinese koines and their relationship with regional speech forms and the received vernacular literature. Finally, it provides a wealth ot information on stylistic speech levels, honorific usage, and social customs of the elite during the early Qing period. The book provides a full translation of the 1703 text of the Arte, an extensive introduction to the life and work of Varo, an index of Chinese characters inserted into the translation, and an index of linguistic terms and concepts. It should be of interest to a diverse readership of Chinese historical, comparative, and descriptive linguists, students of Qing history and literature, historiographers of linguistics, and specialists in early Western religious and cultural contact with China.