Overview

This volume provides a broad introduction to Chinese linguistics, offering an accessible synthesis of the most relevant topics in the field. Despite the steady growth in interest in Chinese linguistics in recent years, this is one of very few books at introductory level written for a Western audience. The authors begin by outlining the history and typology of the Sinitic languages and the writing system of Chinese before moving on to discuss key topics in phonology, morphology and the lexicon, and syntax. Throughout the book, they incorporate and discuss examples from standard and non-standard varieties of Sinitic, and include new research on topics such as dialect writing, subjecthood, and word formation. The book will be a valuable reference both for researchers and scholars in the field of China studies and for linguists, including those with little or no previous knowledge of Chinese.

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9780198847830

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Giorgio Francesco Arcodia is Associate Professor of Chinese at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His work on Sinitic languages has appeared in multiple journals and in edited volumes, and he is the author of Lexical Derivation in Mandarin Chinese (Crane Publishing, 2012) and, with Caterina Mauri, of La Diversità Linguistica (Carocci, 2016). His research focuses on word formation, Chinese dialectology, and the typology of Sinitic languages. Bianca Basciano is Associate Professor of Chinese at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She obtained a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Verona with a thesis entitled 'Verbal Compounding and Causativity in Mandarin Chinese'. Her research focuses on Chinese morphology and the syntax-semantics interface, especially on compounding, reduplication, resultatives, and causative constructions, and she has written a number of research papers on these topics. She is also the author of several entries in the Brill Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics and co-author of the entry on Morphology in Sino-Tibetan languages in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics.

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