​Edward McDonald gained his BA(Hons) from the University of Sydney in 1988, his MA from Peking University in 1992, and his PhD from Macquarie University in 1999, with theses on the clause and verbal group grammar of modern Chinese. He has taught linguistics, Chinese language, translation, semiotics, and music at universities in Australia, China, Singapore, and New Zealand. His recent research interests include the application of systemic functional theory to a range of languages including modern Chinese and Scottish Gaelic (Meaningful Arrangement: exploring the syntactic description of texts, Equinox 2008); Chinese language teaching and the hybrid concept of "sinophone" (Learning Chinese, Turning Chinese: challenges to becoming sinophone in a globalised world, Routledge 2011).

• Acknowledgments.- Briefing Key issues and organisational features of this book.- PreludeFraming the problem of language and meaning.- Part I Traditions of language study: Graeco-Roman vis-à-vis Sinitic.- Chapter 1 Language, writing and metaphors for language.- Snapshot 1Dialectic; Analogy v. anomaly.- Chapter 2 Language in education and the foundations of linguistic scholarship.- Snapshot 2 Ordering of words; Language as manifestation of the way.- Chapter 3 The discovery of language history.- Snapshot 3 Characters and order of universe; Grammatical form as expression of mind.- Chapter 4 From philology to linguistics.- Interlude Establishing a modern paradigm.- Part II The making of modern grammatics: developing tools for the analysis of wording.- Chapter 5 From “(single) articulation” to “double articulation”: meaning ↔ wording ↔ sound.- Chapter 6 “Parts of speech” and “word classes”: defining basic categories for grammatical analysis.- Chapter 7“Word grammar” and “clause grammar”: separating morphological from syntactic patterning.- Chapter 8 Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations: structure and system.- Postlude The long 20th century of linguistics.- Debriefing The history of linguistics and the study of language.- References.