The Cartography of Chinese Syntax: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 11

This edited volume provides new insights into the architecture of Chinese grammar from a comparative perspective, using principles of cartography. Cartography is a research program within syntactic theory that is guided by the view that syntactic structures contain grammatical and functional
information that is ideal for semantic interpretation - by studying the syntactic structures of a particular language, syntacticians can better understand the semantic issues at play in that language. The chapters in this book map out the topography of a variety of constructions in Chinese,
specifically information structure, wh-question formation, and peripheral functional elements. The syntactic structure of Chinese makes it an ideal language for this line of research, because functional elements are often spread throughout sentences rather than clumped together as is usually
dictated by language-specific morphology. Mapping Chinese syntactic structures therefore offers a window into the origin of heavily scrambled constructions often observed in other languages. The book includes a preface that will discusses the goal of cartography and explains how the collection
contributes towards our understanding of this approach to syntax. The subsequent seven original articles all contain original syntactic data that is invaluable for future research in cartography, and the collection as a whole paints a broader picture of how the alignment between syntax and semantics
works in a principled way.

Author: Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 08/04/2015
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780190210694

About the Author

Dylan Tsai is a Professor of Linguistics at the National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan.