While China has a long tradition of lexicography and of phonological studies, unlike Europe and Indian it has no tradition of descriptive or prescriptive grammar. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar fills that gap and is the first comprehensive introduction to syntactical analysis of Classical Chinese. Focusing on the language of the high classical period, which ranges from the time of Confucius to the unification of the empire by Qin in -221, the books pays particular attention to the Mencius, the Lunyu, and, to a lesser extent, the Zuozhuan texts. Renowed for his work in Classical Chinese, Edwin Pulleyblank opens the book with a brief historical overview and a discussion of the relationship between the writing system and the phonology. An outline of the overall principles of word order and sentence structure follows. He then deals with the main sentence types: nominal predicates, verbal predicates, and numerical expressions, which constitute a special type of quasiverbal predication. The final section covers topics such as subordinate constituents of sentences, non-declarative sentence types, and complex sentences. Clear and well organized, Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar is an authoritative study and will be an invaluable resource tool for anyone involved in Chinese language studies.

Published in the early part of this century, Bernhard Karlgren's classic work Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise laid the foundation in western sinology for the scientific reconstruction of Chinese pronunciation. In this present study E.G. Pulleyblank gives the first full-scale review of Karlgren's work, taking into account advances in knowledge over the past fifty years in both the history of the Chinese language and in general linguistic theory. The introductory chapter gives a brief history of "Standard Chinese" and defines the author's own phonological theory based on the concept of distinctive features. Pulleyblank then applies this theory to a detailed analysis of Pekingese, the dialect base for contemporary Chinese. He follows this with a reconstruction of Late Middle Chinese (LMC) which depends on a new interpretation of the Four Grades (si deng) of the rhyme tables. This interpretation provides the key to the correct phonological structure of LMC and to an understanding of subsequent developments. Further chapters deal with the pre-Tang language, Early Middle Chinese (EMC). They contain a discussion of its sources as well as an actual reconstruction -- one which departs in fundamental ways from the traditional Karlgren system. A comparison of both EMC and LMC with Karlgren's "Ancient Chinese," as he called the Qieyun language, is given in one of the appendices to the book. A second appendix gives a new reconstruction of Early Mandarin (EM) of the 13th and 14th century as presented in the Zhongyuan yin yun, a rhyme dictionary of the early 14th century. This book constitutes the most comprehensive and challenging treatment of its subject since the pioneering work of Karlgren. It will be welcomed by specialists as an up-to-date and definitive statement of the views of one of the world's leading sinologists.

Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481–221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC–AD 220) China. In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.