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In his Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968), still the best grammar of Mandarin available, Y.R. Chao states that all clauses in Chinese are topic-comment, and there are no exceptions, though there are some clauses that only have comments, as in (1): 1. 下雨了。   Xià   yǔ     le.   fall  rain  csm   ‘It’s raining.’ Put very simply, the structure of the clause has two parts: the topic, which is reference to some referent available for comment; and the comment, which supplies some information about that topic. Chao (1955, 1959) argued that word order is no…

The title of this article presupposes that there is some global category of all languages called “subject” that we can talk about. Up to the early 1970s that would have been a generally common assumption, despite the fact that there was much disagreement about and no universal notion of “subject” (Platt 1971; Van Valin 1977, 1981; Foley and Van Valin 1977, 1984; Gary and Keenan 1977; Comrie 1981), though most theories assumed some conception of syntactic functions. The concept of “subject” began with Aristotle's theory of truth, but Aristotle defined subject (Greek hypokeímenon—Latin su…

1. Introduction What is classified as the Dúlóng 獨龍 or T’rung [tə̆rùŋ] language by the authorities in China is part of a larger Tibeto-Burman language that also includes what is called the Rawang (Rvwàng) language of Myanmar by the speakers in Myanmar and Ānóng 阿儂 by the speakers of the variety spoken in Fúgòng 福貢 county on the Nù 怒 River in Yúnnán Province in China. They have traditionally not had a single designation for themselves as a group, but recognize their mutual affiliation. Within…

Chao Yuan Ren (Zhào Yuánrèn 趙元任), often abbreviated as “Y.R. Chao”, courtesy name Xuānzhòng 宣重 (3 November 1892 in Tiānjīn 天津 – 25 February 1982 in Cambridge, Mass.), was the first linguist from China to make major contributions to linguistics in both China and the West. He was born when China was still ruled by the Qīng (Manchu) Dynasty, one of his ancestors being the famous poet and criticial historiographer Zhào Yì 趙翼 (1727–1814). He thus received a traditional Confucian education, but as beneficiary of a scholarship from the “Boxer Indemnity Fund” ( gēngzǐ 庚子 [or quánluàn 拳亂] péikuǎn 賠款)…