Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

In principle, anybody can be bilingual and multilingual, as human beings have the capacity to learn as many languages as they are willing to and the social conditions allow. Indeed, the vast majority of the world’s population are bilingual and multilingual. Nevertheless, there are different pathways to bilingualism and multilingualism, and there are plenty of examples of people who either failed to acquire a language sufficiently to communicate with others in it, or those who, despite knowing other languages, function as monolinguals. The questions then are: What are the con…

In many parts of the world, there are children acquiring Chinese alongside one or more additional languages. For the purposes of this entry, we will consider any child who uses two or more languages on a daily basis to be bilingual. We will focus on Bilingual First Language Acquisition (BFLA) which we may define as the concurrent acquisition of two languages in a child who is exposed to them from birth and uses both regularly in early childhood (Yip 2013). By early childhood, we mean the preschool years up to around age five. The term “Chinese” encompasses a family of dialect groups whi…

How does one brain handle two languages? How does the bilingual brain change in both function and structure as a result of learning a second language (L2)? Bilingualism and second language acquisition issues have attracted the attention of not just second language teachers and psycholinguists, but also neuroscientists. Neuroscientists used to rely primarily on clinical case studies of bilingual aphasic patients for understanding how the bilingual brain works. Today, they can identify the neural …

bā guā 八卦 ‘eight trigrams’: Origin of the Chinese Writing System Bā Jīn 巴金 (1904–2005): Esperanto bǎ 把: Light Verbs bǎ 把-construction: Areal Typology | Bǎ 把-construction | Movement Structures | Serial Verbs | Syntax-Phonology Interface | Systemic Linguistics | Warring States to Medieval Chinese bǎ 把-construction, acquisition: Acquisition of Bèi 被 and Bǎ 把, L1 bǎ 把-construction, aspect: Aspect, Inner bǎ 把-construction, coverbs: Serial Verbs bǎ 把-construction, development: Warring States to Medieval Chinese bǎ 把-construction, Medieval Chinese: Medieval Chinese Syntax bǎ 把-cons…

The designation "binome", Chinese liánmiánzì 聯緜字 ~ 連綿字, more technically liánmiáncí 聯緜詞 (excluding references to unanalyzable three-syllable expressions that share some phonetic feature), is a cover term for two different types of two-syllable expressions (in written form: two-character expressions) in Classical Chinese. Type I are those in which the two syllables have some significant phonetic feature in common, so that the expression is riming, alliterative or reduplicated. Type II are those that do not…

The knowledge of modern biological sciences began to reach China during the second part of the 19th century and the local practice of the various sciences actually became a reality at the beginning of the 20th century, greatly aided by what had happened previously in Japan (Kuiper 1993; Masini 1993; Métailié 2001b). By that time, the principles of Western scientific nomenclatures for plants and animals were well known. Codes of nomenclature elaborated during international meetings had already es…