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Article Dans Une Revue Linguistic Typology Année : 2007

Chinese linguistics and typology: The state of the art

Résumé

In this discussion, we provide an overview of the theoretical developments in Chinese linguistics for typology, mainly for the last 10 years. The subjects we treat are those of word order, topic-prominence and syntactic topics, word categories, verb complementation and verb frames, and the relation of diachrony to typology in terms of grammaticalization studies. We conclude with a brief discussion of future challenges and a description of current projects on typology in Chinese linguistics. China possesses rich linguistic resources which remain relatively untapped : the 10 main Sinitic languages or dialect groups account for roughly 93% of the population (Mandarin, Jin, Xiang, Gan, Hui, Wu, Min, Kejia,Yue and Pinghua); the remaining 7% comprise the many different ‘minority’ languages in long term contact with Sinitic such as Tibeto-Burman, Mongolian, Hmong and Tai. In an almost unprecedented state of affairs, written records for Chinese extend without a break 3,000 years into the past, furnishing a rich documentation for any kind of historical study. These factors essentially create an ideal situation for carrying out typology from both synchronic and diachronic viewpoints. Nonetheless, the long-standing tradition in research on language and its relationship to literature in China has meant that very little attention has been directed towards other language families, let alone the dialects of Chinese. This emphasis on ancient versus modern studies, and standard Mandarin versus the other dialect groups in the Sinitic taxon, has led to the situation where the search for linguistic universals on the basis of crosslinguistic work has seen very little development. Even in the many dialect descriptions available, the largest parts of such grammars are devoted to phonology

Dates et versions

hal-03929507 , version 1 (11-01-2023)

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Hilary Chappell, Li Ming, Alain Peyraube. Chinese linguistics and typology: The state of the art. Linguistic Typology, 2007, 11 (1), pp.187-211. ⟨10.1515/lingty.2007.014⟩. ⟨hal-03929507⟩
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