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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

C.-T. James Huang
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Y.-H. Audrey Li
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
Yafei Li
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

We take it as our starting point that a Chinese sentence is composed of words and that words have different behaviors in a sentence. For instance, while dayan fei ‘wild.goose fly’ is an acceptable sentence, *fei dayan ‘fly wild.goose’ is not. The most obvious reason for the contrast is that dayan ‘wild.goose’ is a noun that canonically serves as the subject of the sentence and fei ‘fly’ is a verb whose canonical function is to be the predicate occurring after the subject. This means that in order to understand the syntax of Chinese, or the syntax of any language for that matter, we minimally need to understand how the words in a language are classified and how these different classes of words are put together to form sentences. In this book, word classes are referred to as lexical categories, or just categories for short, following the terminological convention of generative syntax.

While the basic distinction between nouns and verbs is universally recognized in modern literature on Chinese syntax, scholars differ, sometimes drastically, on other categories. See Chao (1968), Li and Thompson (1981), Zhu (1982), and Xing and Ma (1992) for a few examples. The differences in opinion arise partly because linguists with different theoretical backgrounds may employ different criteria for word classification, and partly because we still lack sufficient knowledge about certain words and their properties.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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  • Categories
  • C.-T. James Huang, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Y.-H. Audrey Li, University of Southern California, Yafei Li, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Book: The Syntax of Chinese
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166935.002
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  • Categories
  • C.-T. James Huang, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Y.-H. Audrey Li, University of Southern California, Yafei Li, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Book: The Syntax of Chinese
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166935.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Categories
  • C.-T. James Huang, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Y.-H. Audrey Li, University of Southern California, Yafei Li, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Book: The Syntax of Chinese
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166935.002
Available formats
×