Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

1. Introduction In English, it seems obvious what a word is: it is a meaningful unit written between spaces. In Chinese, there is a similar unit, also written between (invisible) spaces: it is called zì 字, a monosyllabic graph that in most cases has a meaning. Naturally, many people equate “word” in English with zì in Chinese. For example, Mǎ Jiànzhōng 馬建忠 (1844–1900), a pioneer of modern linguistics in China and the first native scholar to write a grammar of Chinese (Mǎ 1898), calls a verb dòngzì 動字 ‘action zì’, a noun míngzì 名字 ‘name zì’, a conjunction liánzì 連字 ‘connection zì’, and so on. Howe…

A word is classically defined as a “minimal free form”. The term, however, belongs to the most problematic ones in linguistics generally and it is often avoided because of  an inherent fuzziness, which is to a large extent also a consequence of this term’s originating in natural language. Although it is still at issue whether the notion of a word has been always alien to both the indigenous Chinese philological tradition and the linguistic intuition of native speakers of Chinese, as is usually a…

The words of a language can be grouped into the so-called word classes, also known as lexical categories or parts of speech, as e.g., “noun” and “verb”. Word classes group words together according to a number of shared phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties (Kaltz 2000; Anward 2006). The traditional word classes of the Western grammatical tradition date back at least to Dionysius Thrax’s Technè Grammatikè Τέχνη γραμματική [The art of grammar] (late 2nd century BCE), which identifies eight distinct parts of speech. Given the great crosslinguistic variat…

Word classes ( cílèi 詞類 in Modern Chinese) are usually understood as categories of words with similar morphosyntactic and/or semantic characteristics. The widely used concept of word classes or “parts of speech” is based on the Greco-Latin grammarian tradition, which has survived until present in most textbooks of particular languages and in many domains of applied linguistics. It is so well entrenched that a need is rarely felt to explicitly reflect on the nature of the categories and to clearly a…

In the introduction to his Word Families in Chinese (1934:1), Bernhard Karlgren wrote: “it stands to reason that Chinese does not consist of so and so many thousands of independent monosyllables, none of them cognate to any others; in Chinese, as in all other languages, the words form families, groups of cognate words formed from one and the same primary stem”. In the same text, Karlgren also articulated the notion that in comparing Chinese with related languages, word stems, not words per se, are the appropriate objects of comparison. Karlgren’s Word Families assembled sets of words …

Although Chinese is conventionally written in Chinese characters, the graphic representation of the language and its lexical units should not be confused or even identified with one another. This also applies when looking at the frequency of occurrence of linguistic entities, like words (Word and Wordhood, Premodern and Word and Wordhood, Modern). While quantitative linguistics in China originally set out by exploring character frequencies, the ever faster development of digital computers and related software starting from the late 1970s opened n…

Although the graphic representation of Modern Chinese in the form of Chinese characters, which does not feature word separators like blanks, seems to suggest otherwise, it is a well-known fact that its lexicon – like those of most other languages – contains words of different lengths. However, when studying word length, it is necessary to first reflect on how it should be measured. A prerequisite to this endeavor is that there is some satisfactory answer to the problem of wordhood. A rather obvi…

Different principles determine the word order in a Chinese sentence. The most important two are that Chinese languages are at heart SVO and that old information precedes new information. An additional principle is that if there is a conflict between these two principles, the latter (information structure) overrules the former (basic order). Thus, if the object presents old information while the rest of the verb phrase is in focus presenting new information, the object will occupy a position to the left of the verb. 1. 這本書我已經看過。   Zhè   běn  shū    wǒ   yǐjīng      kàn   guo.   dem  clf  bo…

Throughout Chinese history, there have been several writing systems for visually impaired people, variously called mángwén 盲文 'blind script' or diǎnzì 點字 'dot-characters'. All these writing systems, whether past or present, are phonographic. Chinese writing systems for visually impaired people have so far not gained much attention in studies outside Chinese-speaking areas. Grotz (1996) is the only source providing a description of historical and recently used writing systems. 1. Early Writing Systems The first script for visually impaired people in China for which t…

Up until the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the literary language of classical Chinese, known as wényánwén 文言文, was the written standard. Although there had been proposals for writing in the vernacular in the late Qīng Dynasty (1644–1911) by people like Huáng Zūnxiàn 黄遵憲 (1947–1905) who promoted the view that “my hand writes [what] my mouth [says]” ( Wǒ shǒu xiě wǒ kǒu 我手寫我口), the shift from writing in literary Chinese to writing in the vernacular did not actually occur until the Literary Revolution ( Wénxué gémìng 文學革命) launched by Hú Shì 胡適 (1891–1962) and Chén Dúxiù 陳獨秀 (1879–19…

The Wú 吳 dialects are also known as Jiāng-Zhè huà 江浙話 (i.e., the speech of Jiāngsū and Zhèjiāng provinces). Wú is distributed over most of Zhèjiāng province, the city of Shànghǎi and the southern part of Jiāngsū province, as well as the cities of Shàngráo上饒, Yùshān 玉山, Guǎngfēng 廣豐, and Déxīng 德興 in northeastern Jiāngxī province; Lángxī 郎溪 and Guǎngdé 廣德 in the south of Ānhuī province; the ancient Xuānzhōu 宣州 area to the south of the Yangtze River and to the east of Huángshān 黃山; and Púchéng 浦城 …