A Reference Grammar of Chinese

Current, comprehensive and written by leading scholars, this corpus-based reference work is the definitive guide to Chinese grammar.

Chu-Ren Huang (Edited by), Dingxu Shi (Edited by)

9780521769396, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 March 2016

630 pages, 3 b/w illus. 9 tables
24.4 x 17 x 3.5 cm, 1.35 kg

'This excellent grammar book as a whole provides a comprehensive description of the Chinese language in use and constitutes a new landmark that will be critical for future empirical research on Chinese. It is certainly a useful reference book that will help not only researchers in encouraging descriptive and theoretical linguists to conduct research in creative ways but also language learners and teachers to navigate the complexity of learning and teaching of Chinese.' Guozhen Peng, Journal of Chinese Language and Discourse

A Reference Grammar of Chinese is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the linguistic structure of Chinese, covering all of the important linguistic features of the language and incorporating insights gained from research in Chinese linguistics over the past thirty years. With contributions from twenty-two leading Chinese linguists, this authoritative guide uses large-scale corpora to provide authentic examples based on actual language use. The accompanying online example databases ensure that a wide range of exemplars are readily available and also allow for new usages to be updated. This design offers a new paradigm for a reference grammar where generalizations can be cross-checked with additional examples and also provide resources for both linguistic studies and language learning. Featuring bilingual term lists, this reference grammar helps readers to access relevant literature in both English and Chinese and is an invaluable reference for learners, teachers and researchers in Chinese linguistics and language processing.

1. Preliminaries Chu-Ren Huang and Dingxu Shi
2. Syntactic overview Dingxu Shi and Chu-Ren Huang
3. Lexical word formation Jerome Packard
4. Verbs and verb phrases Audrey Y. H. Li
5. Aspectual system Sze-Wing Tang
6. Negation Haihua Pan, Po Lun Peppina Lee and Chu-Ren Huang
7. Classifiers Kathleen Ahrens and Chu-Ren Huang
8. Nouns and nominal phrases Dingxu Shi
9. Relative constructions Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip
10. Adjectives and adjective phrases Shi-Zhe Huang, Jing Jin and Dingxu Shi
11. Comparison Marie-Claude Paris and Dingxu Shi
12. Adverbs Yung-O Biq and Chu-Ren Huang
13. Prepositions and preposition phrases Jingxia Lin and Chaofen Sun
14. Sentence types Weidong Zhan and Xiaojing Bai
15. Major non-canonical clause types ba and bei Hilary Chappell and Dingxu Shi
16. Deixis and anaphora Yan Jiang
17. Information structure Shu-ing Shyu
Appendix. Punctuations Shui Duen Chan.

Subject Areas: Grammar & vocabulary [CJBG], Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Usage & grammar guides [CBG]