The primary function of language is to convey what we mean for communication. Semantics, a subfield of linguistics, aims to understand how meanings are encoded and operate in different levels of linguistic forms (such as morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, and discourses). The cumulative evidence thus far has mainly been based on native speaker intuitions about the meanings of linguistic forms in language usage. With recent breakthroughs in neuroimaging techniques, neurolinguistic research has been used to test and evaluate theories put forth by theoretical linguistics by measuring the brain activity underlying language processes. This chapter reviews a series of neurolinguistics studies that took N400, an event–related potentials (ERPs) component to index the semantic processing, to investigate how the brain processes meaning conveyed by Chinese radicals, characters, classifiers, and the leading context of sentences. These findings make essential contributions to the growing understanding of when and how meanings are extracted, represented, and processed in the brain for language comprehension.

This chapter reviews and discusses issues involving the case theory in the generative framework of syntax with data from Chinese, a language without overt morphological case marking. Specifically, it addresses the interrelationship of abstract case, morphological case, and the thematic roles of NPs; the association between the distribution of NPs and case positions; and the possibility of overt vs. covert arguments and the finite tense. The data presented here highlight the variety of ways in which language facts can be described. The challenges to case theory arise not only from the morphological realization of cases on NPs, but also from the flexibility of the number of NPs that can be associated with a given verb, the flexibility of thematic roles associated with a verbal event, and the optionality of word order, as well as the possibility of overt subjects in non-finite clauses. Amid the advancement of cross-linguistic observations, Universal Grammar may eventually inform a holistic account of human languages, in which case theory is superseded by a more fine-grained mechanism for argument-thematic mapping, together with more careful consideration of information structure.

The canonical word order of Modern Chinese is SVO, and yet Modern Chinese does not demonstrate the patterns of a typical VO language. This chapter reviews representative arguments that have contributed to our closer understanding of what pragmatic and semantic factors condition word order variation in Modern Chinese. Discourse analyses in relation with information structure account for the pragmatic function of the preverbal object and why there is the relative ordering between subject and object in non-canonical SOV/OSV patterns, based on the notion of topicality, focus, and emphatic/contrastive function. Semantic accounts explain how the animacy of subject and object constrains the obligatory vs. optional ba marking of object in the SOV pattern and the acceptability of the OSV pattern. Finally, arguments based on iconicity principle and lexical aspect analyses are used to account for the relative ordering of verb and locative/temporal adverbials.

This chapter synthesizes the alternation patterns in the morphophonology of Chinese affixation, and analyzes rime change (变韵 biànyuùn) mutation-like phenomena in terms of featural affixation. The main goal is to demonstrate that the paucity of affixation in Chinese languages/dialects does not render Chinese alternations less relevant to typological and theoretical pursuits. Two areas of morphophonology are examined to illustrate how phonetics/phonology interact with morphology under Chinese affixation: unexpected affixed outputs and the phonological realizations of featural affixes. Case studies of unexpected morphophonological outputs and unfaithful parsing of some root/affix features are reviewed, and the seemingly exceptional cases are explained by preservation of phonological/phonetic contrasts within the root-diminutive morphological paradigm and/or by morphological, prosodic and segmental principles and restrictions. An overview of the typology and characteristics of Chinese featural affixes is presented. The analytical approach rests on the theoretical underpinnings of non-linear phonology, the item-and-arrangement morphological model, and the notion of contrast preservation.

The debate on modern Chinese being SVO or SOV is facing a dilemma: the word order is SVO in an unmarked declarative sentence in Chinese, while Chinese exhibits many features shared by SOV languages. To tackle this difficult situation, researchers should focus on language types, but not the relative orders of subject, verb, and object. Based on the usage of modern Chinese, we have checked ten universals generalized in Greenberg (1963) which are relevant to this topic. It is shown that 90% of the universals support Chinese being a SOV language, and only one universal is on the SVO side. Modern Chinese is therefore argued to be located very close to the SOV end of a continuum.

Case theory is a theoretical tool in the generative grammar to capture generalizations regarding categorial distribution, particularly the nominal category in relation to others. The notion of case can describe the close relation between grammatical categories, such as a verb/preposition and its object, or the subject of a sentence and the tense or agreement of the sentence. This chapter reviews the advantages of adopting the notion of abstract case in Chinese, a language without overt morphological case marking. Data and issues discussed include how the challenges Chinese poses to the word order correlations proposed as universals or tendencies in typological studies cease to be problems if the notion of abstract case interacts with word order universals, what the postverbal structure constraint is in Chinese, and how Case plays a role in the analysis, whether there are true pre-nominal PPs in Chinese, and whether tensed and non-tensed clauses can be distinguished in Chinese, as well as the role of case in capturing the behavior of clauses.

This chapter revisits the character-based approach to Chinese grammar and the ongoing debate about how to define the concept of a word in Chinese. The authors provide a variety of evidence, including distributional generalizations in corpus and Chinese word-level and phrase-level rules, such as Mandarin alphabetic words, replaceable idioms, and abbreviations, to argue that character and monosyllabicity plays an indispensable role in Chinese linguistics. It is shown that although words do serve as basic units in Chinese grammar, yet some important generalizations of Chinese grammar cannot be achieved without also employing the concept of characters. The examples provided in the chapter show that some morphosyntactic constraints can be better accommodated by treating characters as basic units in addition to words. In conclusion, the authors return to an integrated account of character as both an orthographic and linguistic unit in Chinese. This integrated account captures fully and more precisely Chinese syntactic and word formation behaviors that had been challenging to word-based accounts.

The question of what canonical word order Chinese has is not a controversial issue at the present time; most of the studies within the last 30 years assume that the canonical word order of Modern Chinese is SVO. However, during the 1970s and 80s there was a lively debate on Chinese word order concerning its historical development as well as its status in Modern Chinese. This chapter reviews the arguments for and against SVO as the canonical word order in Chinese. Arguments for SVO originated as reactions against two claims: Chinese is in the process of becoming an SOV language, and Modern Chinese is an SOV language. A wide range of arguments have been brought forth to argue against the two claims, including historical development, grammar internal considerations, typological features, and discourse analysis.

This chapter shows that treating the Chinese classifier system as a lexicalized semantic system based on shared ontology predicts both the agreement patterns that motivate the structure-based accounts, and the semantic selection patterns that motivate the cognition-based accounts. In the chapter, different perspectives toward classifiers are introduced including a cognition-based account (predicting a strong correlation with perception that is also robust and without exceptions but allows some fuzzy, overlapping classifications) and a structure-based account (predicting a strongly binary classification and a robust grammaticality judgement). Controversial issues regarding Chinese classifiers, such as the distinction between classifiers and measure words, the agreement between a classifier and its head noun, and the nature of 的 DE insertion, are explicated to show the pros and cons of various approaches. The authors demonstrate that Chinese classifiers are coherently organized in a ontology-driven lexical-semantic system. Major unresolved issues in the Mandarin classifiers system are closely examined at the end of the chapter.

Words pose a theoretical challenge in Chinese, but words pose a challenge in any language. Even though Chinese is written with monosyllabic, monomorphemic characters and no overt word boundaries, there is as much evidence here as there is in English or any other language for a level between the morpheme and the phrase, interfacing between the lexicon and the grammar. Yet their interface role makes words dynamic things, subject to distinct and often conflicting constraints from processing, semantics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. To emphasize the universality of this situation, the chapter starts with a quick look at the dynamic nature of English words before turning to focus on Chinese words, which a wide variety of data reveal as surprisingly English-like, including a strong preference for disyllabicity. The chapter ends by sketching a formalism that may help capture the universal yet dynamic nature of wordhood, showing how it helps account for some of the Chinese facts.

This article compares the presence of some functional categories which are at play in English or in French to their absence in Mandarin. It shows that rather than being ‘absent’ these categories are inactive, due to the analyticity of the language. For instance, Mandarin ‘lacks’ (i) subject–verb agreement, (ii) plural markers on nouns, (iii) a complementizer as a head of a clause in subject or in object position, and (iv) verb gapping.

This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on Chinese sentence-final particles (SFPs) from sociolinguistic and discourse perspectives. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to the typological and areal features associated with SFPs, followed by discussions of studies of this linguistic category in data-based empirical research as well as in descriptive grammars. The goal of the overview is to identify the main strands of theoretical underpinnings as well as to outline the major methodological approaches. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.