New Horizons in Chinese Linguistics

This work is an introduction to the "state of the art" of Chinese linguistics, focusing especially on developments since the 1970s. Chinese is one of the few languages, outside of the languages of the Indo-European family, that have a long tradition of linguistic scholarship of their own. This tradition has continued to date and continues to bring new results, often with interesting (though unnoticed) consequences for linguistic theories developed in the West. The study of modern Chinese is characterized by attempts to understand the nature of Chinese in light of explicit linguistic theories and how the study may in turn help shape the future of mainstream linguistic theory. The ten chapters collected in this volume address a major area in both traditional and current theoretical research, as well as areas that represent newly cultivated frontiers in cognitive science: language diversity, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. This volume can be used both as a textbook for upper-division or graduate introduction to Chinese linguistics, and as a reference handbook for the linguist or general reader who would like to know about the current state of Chinese linguistic research.