Chinese Syntactic Grammar: Functional and Conceptual Principles is unique in that it discusses the organizational principles of Chinese syntactic structures in terms of conceptual and functional principles, which are iconic and hence are easy to understand and apply. The organizational principles mainly comprise the three Chinese conceptual principles of Temporal Sequence, Temporal Scope, and Whole-Before-Part (Tai, 1985) and the two functional principles of Communicative Dynamism and the Principle of Topic-End Focus. By analyzing the semantic roles of each clause element, Chinese Syntactic Grammar reveals that the conceptual principles play a crucial role in organizing ideas and bringing units (such as subject, verb, and object) together to form grammatical sequences, which manifest S (A) V O (C), which is the basic Chinese word order. The functional principles control and govern variations of the basic sentence structure, which are motivated to facilitate effective communication and achieve specific communicative goals, thus generating several special structures, including the Bá/Bèi/null Bèi sentences, etc. The variant forms are motivated to achieve special communicative goals, and to facilitate effective communication. Another feature of the book is that it focuses on reasons, rather than merely on a description of rules. The language is lucid, and the arguments are cogent. The scope and depth of the investigation make the volume one of the most thorough and relatively complete pedagogical reference books. Chinese Syntactic Grammar can serve as a textbook for training professional CFL teachers. It is a must-read book for Mandarin Chinese teachers as a handy manual, also for intermediate and advanced Chinese learners if they want to have deeper insight into the nature of the Chinese language. Linguists who are interested in cognitive grammar and specialists across many fields including education, psychology, communication, and information science will find the book enlightening and interesting.

Fundamental Structures of the Chinese Language is an exceptional resource for understanding how Chinese grammar functions in natural discourse. This book departs from the conventional approach of superimposing grammatical constructs from English onto Chinese and focuses on the topic–comment structure inherent in the Chinese language. Constructions that are usually considered complex or challenging for students whose mother tongues are subject–verb–object languages will be more easily understandable with this analysis. Simple and complex verbal structures are discussed in depth with the incorporation of the aspect category, which provides an enormous richness of nuances in the internal development of the action, and word order is considered one of the key features of the Chinese language. All the explanations are applied to numerous examples of real Chinese texts. This textbook is a valuable resource for students, teachers, and researchers in Chinese language courses including Chinese translation, Chinese linguistics, and comparison linguistics in general.

"In this book, linguistic achievements of word order studies in Chinese have been applied to Chinese second language acquisition research. By analyzing a great number of word order errors made by learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), this book has developed a method for describing and explaining Chinese word order errors. With this method, the book has the potential to empower CFL teachers all over the world to teach Chinese in an informed manner, and particularly to teach Chinese word order more effectively and efficiently." --Book Jacket.

The past decade and a half has witnessed a great deal of renewed interest in the study of Chinese linguistics, not only in the traditional areas of philological studies and in theoretically oriented areas of syn chronic grammar and language change but also in the cultivation of new frontiers in related areas of the cognitive sciences. There is a significant increase in the number of students studying one area or another of the linguistic structure of Chinese in various linguistic programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Several new academic departments devoted to the study of linguistics have been established in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years. The increasing research and study activities have also resulted in a number of national and international conferences, including the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which has been held annually in the United States; the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL), which has had its fourth meeting since it was launched by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1990; the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (lACL), created in Singapore in 1992 and now incorporated in Irvine, California, which has held its annual meetings at major institutions in Asia, Europe, and the US.

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.