Bücher der Reihe Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics

This book conducts a thorough investigation of the variation in tone sandhi patterns of Shanghai and Wuxi Wu using quantitative rating experiments.

This book studies Chinese opposites. It uses a large corpus (GigaWord) to trace the behavior of opposite pairings' co-occurrence, focusing on the following questions: In what types of constructions, from window-size restricted and bi-syllabic to quad-syllabic, will the opposite pairings appear together?

This book defines Chinese middle constructions as generic constructions, with their highest syntactically saturated argument always understood as an arbitrary one.

This book concerns two focus particles (jiu, dou) and wh-expressions (shenme = 'what', na geren = 'which person') in Mandarin Chinese. An idea based on alternatives and varieties of alternatives in particular - following Chierchia's 2013 analysis of the polarity system - is pursued to account for the systematic ambiguities.

This book presents new perspectives on the study of Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics. Based on the international Workshop on Aspect and Modality in Chinese, the book includes the latest research findings in the field to make them available not only to specialists in Classical and Buddhist Chinese, but also to researchers and students of general linguistics and of the universals of language. It also discusses different aspects of the AM (Aspect-Modality) and the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Modality) system of Chinese. It provides a comprehensive overview of both of the universally related systems of aspect and modality. The first part of the book focuses on aspectual features of Chinese; these include basic studies on the syntactic representation of the aspectual structure of the verb phrase in Archaic Chinese, the aspectual function of different object constructions and their development, temporal features of the verb phrase, and the aspectual functions of no minalization processes. The second part includes articles highlighting different aspects of the modal system or the interplay between tense, aspect and modality in Chinese, including a survey on the history of studies on modality in Chinese and the modal and temporal aspectual/markers indicating future meanings, a specialized study on modal deontic verbs in the Buddhist Vinaya texts, the modal function of rhetorical questions in Buddhist Chinese, and a study on the diachronic development of the aspectual and modal system in Chinese.

This book offers a laboratory phonological analysis of the sonority hierarchy and natural classes in nasal harmony using an artificial grammar-learning paradigm.

This book investigates the diachronic change of the tone sandhi of Southern Min Chinese, which is known for its synchronic arbitrariness and opacity. It argues that in final-prominent tone sandhi, the change of final tones and the change of non-final tones can be highly independent and essentially different from each other.

This book studies Chinese opposites. It uses a large corpus (GigaWord) to trace the behavior of opposite pairings' co-occurrence, focusing on the following questions: In what types of constructions, from window-size restricted and bi-syllabic to quad-syllabic, will the opposite pairings appear together?

This book offers new perspectives on the study of Chinese lexical semantics, as well as discourse analysis and cognitive pragmatics based on lexical semantics.

This book offers new perspectives on the study of Chinese lexical semantics, as well as discourse analysis and cognitive pragmatics based on lexical semantics.

The intended readership includes, but is not limited to, graduate students in linguistics and researchers interested in Chinese linguistics in particular, and in lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics in general.

This book is a comprehensive study on the phonetic characteristics of citation tones in Chaoshan Chinese. This book not only provides a large-scale typological study on Chaoshan Chinese, but also offers a good example of how to figure out the evolutionary paths of tones from the perspective of variation.