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Since the beginning of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of documents of all sorts have been unearthed in China, opening whole new fields of study and transforming our modern understanding of ancient China. While these discoveries have necessarily taken place in China, Western scholars have also contributed to the study of these documents throughout this entire period. This book provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of these Western scholars to the field of Chinese paleography, and especially to study of oracle-bone inscriptions, bronze and stone inscriptions, and manuscripts written on bamboo and silk. Each of these topics is provided with a comprehensive narrative...
Natural languages offer many examples of displacement, i.e. constructions in which a non-local expression is critical for some grammatical end. Two central examples include phenomena such as raising and passive on the one hand, and control on the other. Though each phenomenon is an example of displacement, they have been theoretically distinguished. Movement rules have generated the former and formally very different construal rules, the latter. The "Movement Theory of Control" challenges this differentiation and argues that the operations that generate the two constructions are the same, the differences arising from the positions through which the displaced elements are moved. In the context of the Minimalist Program, reducing the class of basic operations is methodologically prized. This volume is a collection of original papers that argue for this approach to control on theoretical and empirical grounds as well. The papers also develop and constrain the movement theory to account for novel phenomena from a variety of languages."
This book studies the Tangwang language, providing the first comprehensive grammar in English of this Chinese variety, with detailed analysis of its phonology, morphology, and syntax. This fills a gap in the literature, as previously only a few articles on this language were available. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach, examining genetic data to determine historical patterns of population migration, as well as linguistic data that focus on the influence of the Dongxiang (Santa) language as a consequence of language contact on the Silk Road. The concluding chapter argues that Tangwang has not yet become a mixed language, and that syntactic borrowing has a stronger impact than lexical borrowing on languages.
The Studies in Japanese and Korean Historical and Theoretical Linguistics and Beyond presented in honour of Prof. John B. Whitman includes contributions by a range of mid-generation to senior scholars among his closest colleagues and collaborators representing the front line of contemporary research in the areas of historical and theoretical linguistics of Japanese and Korean as well of Chinese, Turkish, and Russian. Particularly, in all these areas it deals with still ongoing debates about the important issues in historical and theoretical linguistics concerning these languages that are reflected in articles often representing opposing points of view. This book can serve as a good introduction to the current state-of-art and the most essential problems in the fields it covers.
The present study is the first to apply a syntactic approach to the grammaticalization of Chinese modals, based on hypotheses on cross-linguistic diachronic developments of modals from lexical to functional categories as upward movement on a functional spine. The temporal framework of the study covers Late Archaic and Middle Chinese. Early Middle Chinese is a crucial turning point for the development of Chinese from a more synthetic to a more analytic language. This change is attributed e.g. to the loss of a former morphology, which also affects the modal system. Against this background, the negative cycle of Chinese, the relevance of polarity contexts, and the development of a new system of...
This book sheds light on the variety of mathematical cultures in general. To do so, it concentrates on cultures of computation and quantification in the ancient world, mainly in ancient China, South Asia, and the Ancient Near East and offers case studies focused on numbers, quantities, and operations, in particular in relation to mathematics as well as administrative and economic activities. The various chapters focus on the different ways and contexts of shaping numbers and quantities, and on the procedures applied to them. The book places special emphasis on the processes of emergence of place-value number systems, evidenced in the three geographical areas under study All these features yi...
This volume contains a selection of papers dealing with constructions that have a passive-like interpretation but do not seem to share all the properties with canonical passives. The fifteen chapters of this volume raise important questions concerning the proper characterization of the universal properties of passivization and reflect the current discussion in this area, covering syntactic, semantic, psycho-linguistic and typological aspects of the phenomenon, from different theoretical perspectives and in different language families and backed up in most cases by extensive corpora and experimental studies.
Recent discoveries of bronze ritual vessels from ancient China provide the ground for this collection of essays, which focus in particular on the nature and patterns of family lineages as seen from these artifacts found in tombs throughout north China. Based on careful readings of the inscriptions on the bronze vessels, the editor and his eight contributors reconstruct the genealogies, kinship structures, political identities, and relationship networks of leading families and individuals from BronzeAge China. The rich scholarship also contributes to our understanding of the archaeology, chronology, warfare, and legal structures of ancient China. "The bronze inscriptions from ancient China ar...
Book one of the Man’yōshū (‘Anthology of Myriad Leaves’) continues Alexander Vovin’s new English translation of this 20-volume work originally compiled between c.759 and 785 AD. It is the earliest Japanese poetic anthology in existence and thus the most important compendium of Japanese culture of the Asuka and Nara periods. Book one is the seventh volume of the Man’yōshū to be published to date (following books fifteen (2009), five (2011), fourteen (2012), twenty (2013), seventeen (2016) and eighteen (2016). Each volume of the Vovin translation contains the original text, kana transliteration, romanization, glossing and commentary.
This volume provides a much-needed, critical overview of the field of constructions and construction grammar in the context of Singapore English, and poses the question of identifying a construction in contact when the lexicon is derived from one language and the syntax from another. Case studies are illustrated in which the possibility of a 'merger'-construction is offered to resolve such problems. The book is intended for students of construction theories, variation studies, or any researcher of contact grammars