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94 results in Asian language and linguistics

Page 1 of 5

Chinese as a Second Language
  • Theory and Practice
  • Edited by Istvan Kecskes, Yang Zhao
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • Chinese language acquisition has been discussed from pedagogical and discoursal perspectives, however this innovative book presents a linguistic perspective on Chinese as a second language. Bridging theory and practice, it provides an authoritative, research-based foundation to enhance Chinese language teaching and learning methodologies globally. Bringing together 18 leading scholars to explore the linguistic underpinnings of Chinese language teaching and acquisition, the chapters cover key areas of language acquisition such as tone, prosody, Chinese characters, syntax, aspect, and pragmatic competence, and offer new theoretical perspectives, such as cognitive approaches, alongside practical applications. Combining the best scholarship from both Chinese and non-Chinese perspectives, it presents a unique, cross-cultural approach, reflecting global collaboration in the Chinese as a Second Language Research Association (CASLAR) community. Aiming to strengthen the theoretical foundations of language teaching, and advancing Chinese language teaching methodologies, this book is an essential resource for educators and students, as well as researchers.

Interlanguage Grammars of Mandarin Chinese
  • Boping Yuan
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Considering a number of factors such as cross-linguistic influences, saliency and detectability of language cues, language complexity, and the interfaces involved, this book provides a systematic and coherent study of non-native grammars of Chinese. It covers a broad range of language aspects of Chinese as a non-native language, such as syntax, semantics, discourse, and pragmatics, as well as language phenomena specific to Chinese, such as classifiers, sentence final particles, the topic structure, and the ba-construction. It explores the effect on the linguistic structure of Chinese, when it is spoken as a second language by first-language speakers of English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Spanish, Swedish, Russian and Palestinian Arabic, enabling the reader to understand the learners' mental representations of the underlying systems of the target language. New points of departure are also recommended for further research, making it essential reading for both Chinese language teaching practitioners, and academic researchers of non-native language acquisition.

An Introduction to Chinese Linguistics
  • Chan Lü, Zev Handel
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Grounded in descriptive linguistics, this textbook introduces the basics of the major subfields of linguistics, as well as the Chinese writing system, for students with no prior linguistic training. It presents the Chinese language from the perspective of both modern linguistics and its longstanding philological legacy, as well as providing historical and sociolinguistic context. Chapters cover phonology and phonetics, morphology, lexicon, lexical semantics, syntax, sign language and braille. Authentic, real-world examples are drawn from Chinese newspapers, websites, and social media to facilitate meaningful linguistic analysis, while other examples contrast English and Chinese to help students grasp key concepts. Students will also benefit from the robust pedagogical approach, which includes learning objectives, guiding questions, checkpoint summaries, discussion questions, exercises, further readings, and bilingual glossaries. Supplementary resources provide answers to exercises, sample course syllabi, links to resources, and recordings of sounds.

The Sound Patterns of Taiwanese Southern Min
  • Yuchau E. Hsiao
  • Published online:
    28 February 2026
    Print publication:
    19 March 2026
  • Southern Min – the most commonly spoken variant of Taiwanese – has over 100 million speakers. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) phonology, filling a critical gap in linguistic research. It demonstrates how the language's sound patterns have evolved over time, and explores its key phonological and tonal features. Beginning with an overview of the language's phonological system, it progresses to specialized topics, including segmental and tonal mutations, tonal domains, and metrical structures. Grounded in three purpose-built corpora, it integrates empirical data and statistical analyses to illuminate phonological processes and patterns. It also explores rarely addressed topics, including phonological interfaces, the rhythms of poetry and folk ballads, and the iGeneration dialectal variety, providing analytical clarity on complex phenomena. Serving as both a detailed reference for researchers and a supplementary text for phonology and Asian linguistics courses, its illuminating insights will inspire further research into this intricate linguistic system.

Modern Linguistics in Ancient India
  • John J. Lowe
  • Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • The ancient Indian linguistic tradition has been influential in the development of modern linguistics, yet is not well known among modern Western linguists. This unique book addresses this gap by providing an accessible introduction to the Indian linguistic tradition, covering its most important achievements and ideas, and assessing its impact on Western linguistics. It shows how ancient Indian methods of linguistic analysis can be applied to a number of topical issues across the disciplines of modern linguistics–spanning phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and computational linguistics. Exploring the parallels, differences, and connections in how both traditions treat major issues in linguistic science, it sheds new light on a number of topical issues in linguistic theory. Synthesizing existing major work on both sides, it makes Indian linguistics accessible to Western linguists for the first time, as well as making ideas from mainstream linguistics more accessible to students and scholars of Indian grammar.

Chinese Signs
  • An Introduction to China's Linguistic Landscape
  • Zheng-sheng Zhang
  • Published online:
    29 February 2024
    Print publication:
    07 March 2024
  • Highlighting stylistic and rhetorical characteristics, this fully illustrated book explores the written form of Mandarin Chinese in a range of everyday settings. Taking examples from Chinese public writing across a variety of textual genres, such as signs, banners and advertisements, it prepares students for navigating 'real world' Chinese, not only in terms of its linguistic and stylistic characteristics, but also its social and cultural context. Drawing over 500 pictorial examples from the linguistic landscape, it explores the signs from a variety of perspectives, for example by highlighting elements of classical Chinese that are still used in the modern language, showing the most popular rhetorical patterns used in Chinese, and presenting the interactions between both Standard Mandarin and dialect, and Chinese and other languages. Detailed annotations are provided for all signs, in both Chinese and English, to accommodate readers of all proficiency levels in Chinese.

Chinese Politeness
  • Diachrony, Variation, and Universals in Politeness Theory
  • Rong Chen
  • Published online:
    02 November 2023
    Print publication:
    16 November 2023
  • Politeness in Chinese is a well-researched concept in pragmatics; however, this pioneering book sheds an original new light on the subject. It provides a thorough diachronic investigation of Chinese politeness, and argues for universality in politeness theorizing. The author takes us on a journey through changes in Chinese politeness from Confucius to the present day, showing how these processes are reactions to the changing world, rather than to changes in the principles of politeness itself. He splits Chinese face into Face1 and Face2 – the former referring to the person and the latter to the persona of the speaker - and presents a model of Chinese politeness (MCP). He then proposes B&L-E (Brown and Levinson Extended) by incorporating the theoretical constructs of self-politeness and impoliteness. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

A Student Grammar of Chinese
  • Yongping Zhu, Chu-Ren Huang
  • Published online:
    27 April 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • Written for beginning learners of the language, this concise introduction to Chinese grammar assumes only a basic knowledge of Chinese, and no knowledge of grammatical terminology and practices. Comparing Chinese grammar patterns and rules with those of English, and illustrated with a wealth of real-life examples, it allows learners to understand the similarities and differences between the two languages. Using engaging and accessible language, it examines the Chinese sound system, writing system, word formation rules, parts of speech, and simple and complex sentences, as well as explaining special constructions that are typically challenging to second language learners. Each chapter begins with clear learning goals and ends with a useful summary highlighting the chapter's main points. To call attention to specific issues, sidebars are interspersed throughout the text, and exercises within the book and online answer keys help students to reinforce learned material and assist with self-study.

The Evolution of Chinese Grammar
  • Yuzhi Shi
  • Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023
  • The Chinese language has the longest well-documented history among all human languages, making it an invaluable resource for studying how languages develop and change through time. Based on a twenty-year long research project, this pioneering book is the English version of an award-winning study originally published in Chinese. It provides an evolutionary perspective on the history of Chinese grammar, tracing its development from its thirteenth-Century BC origins to the present day. It investigates all the major changes in the history of the language within contemporary linguistic frameworks, and illustrates these with a wide range of examples taken from every stage in the language's development, showing how the author's findings are relevant to contemporary descriptive, theoretical, and historical linguistics. Shedding light on the essential properties of Chinese and, ultimately, language in general, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of Asian linguistics, historical linguistics and syntactic theory.

Korean Grammar
  • A Systemic Functional Approach
  • Mira Kim, J. R. Martin, Gi-Hyun Shin, Gyung Hee Choi
  • Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023
  • Using the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this pioneering book provides the first comprehensive account of Korean grammar, building foundations for an engagement with Korean texts across a range of spoken and written registers and genres. It treats grammar as a meaning-making resource, comprising experiential resources for construing reality, interpersonal resources for enacting social relations, textual resources for composing coherent discourse, and logical resources for linking clauses. It deals not only with clause systems and structures but also focuses on their realisation as groups and phrases (and clause rank particles), and the realisation of these groups and phrases in words (including clitics and relevant suffixation). Its concluding chapter demonstrates how this grammar can be applied – for teaching Korean as a foreign language and for translation and interpreting studies. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of Asian languages and linguistics and functional approaches to grammar description.

The Cambridge Handbook of Korean Linguistics
  • Edited by Sungdai Cho, John Whitman
  • Published online:
    30 September 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022
  • The 'Korean wave' in music and film and Korea's rise to become the twelfth economic power in the world have boosted the world-wide popularity of Korean language study. The linguistic study of Korean, with its rich syntactic and phonological structure, complex writing system, and unique socio-historical context, is now a rapidly growing research area. Contributions from internationally renowned experts on the language provide a state-of-the-art overview of key current research in Korean language and linguistics. Chapters are divided into five thematic areas: phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, and language pedagogy. The Handbook includes cross-linguistic data to illuminate the features of Korean, and examples in Korean script, making it suitable for advanced students and researchers with or without prior knowledge of Korean linguistics. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the exciting and rapidly moving field of Korean linguistics.

The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
  • Edited by Chu-Ren Huang, Yen-Hwei Lin, I-Hsuan Chen, Yu-Yin Hsu
  • Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022
  • The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.

Non-Finiteness
  • A Process-Relation Perspective
  • Bingjun Yang
  • Published online:
    21 April 2022
    Print publication:
    28 April 2022
  • 'Non-finiteness' is a phenomenon that occurs in most natural languages, whereby a verb is not inflected by grammatical tense, and does not possess the grammatical features of aspect, mood or voice. Various theories have been developed to explain their distribution and their role in clause structure, but many instances of non-finiteness remain unaccounted for. Taking a functional approach, this study proposes a 'process relation framework' to explain the more complex, previously unaccounted for, instances of non-finiteness in clause structure. It applies the framework comparatively to non-finiteness in English and Chinese, showing how it can be applied across typologically distinct languages. Drawing on corpus-based instances and observations, it introduces numerous thought-provoking cases, in which constructional (or combining) types and the predictability of non-finiteness co-occur. In terms of application, non-finiteness is decisive in categorising language types, and it is critical in processing natural languages, text segmentation and annotation in particular.

The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia
  • N. J. Enfield
  • Published online:
    22 March 2021
    Print publication:
    01 April 2021
  • Mainland Southeast Asia is one of the most fascinating and complex cultural and linguistic areas in the world. This book provides a rich and comprehensive survey of the history and core systems and subsystems of the languages of this fascinating region. Drawing on his depth of expertise in mainland Southeast Asia, Enfield includes more than a thousand data examples from over a hundred languages from Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam, bringing together a wealth of data and analysis that has not previously been available in one place. Chapters cover the many ways in which these languages both resemble each other, and differ from each other, and the diversity of the area's languages is highlighted, with a special emphasis on minority languages, which outnumber the national languages by nearly a hundred to one. The result is an authoritative treatment of a fascinating and important linguistic area.

The French Language in Russia
  • A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History
  • Gesine Argent, Vladislav Rjéoutski, Derek Offord
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 February 2021
    Print publication:
    10 September 2018
  • With support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK and the Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau --the French Language in Russia provides the fullest examination and discussion to date of the adoption of the French Language by the elites of imperial Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is interdisciplinary, approaching its subject from the angles of various kinds of history and historical sociolinguistics. Beyond its bearing on some of the grand narratives of Russian thought and literature, this book may afford more general insight into the social, political, cultural, and literary implications and effects of bilingualism in a speech community over a long period. It should also enlarge understanding of francophonie as a pan-European phenomenon. On the broadest plane, It has significance in an age of unprecedented global connectivity, for It invites us to look Beyond the experience of a single nation and the social groups and individuals within It in order to discover how languages and the cultures and narratives associated With them have been shared across national boundaries.

Is English an Asian Language?
  • Andy Kirkpatrick, Wang Lixun
  • Published online:
    15 October 2020
    Print publication:
    29 October 2020
  • Asia is now home to some 800 million multilingual speakers of English, more than the total number of native English speakers, and how they use English is continuously evolving and changing to reflect their cultural backgrounds and everyday experiences. Can English, therefore, be considered an Asian language? Drawing upon the Asian Corpus of English, this book will be the first comprehensive account of the roles, uses and features of English in Asia, encompassing several different varieties of Asian English. Chapters cover the distinctive linguistic features of English in different settings, such as in law, religion and popular culture, as well as the use of local rhetorical, pragmatic and cultural styles and its use as a lingua franca among Asian multilinguals. It will also examine the role of English in education - from primary through to higher education - and consider the implications of this for other languages of Asia.

A Phonological History of Chinese
  • Zhongwei Shen
  • Published online:
    09 June 2020
    Print publication:
    04 June 2020
  • The phonological history of Chinese can be traced back to two main traditions: one starting with the Qieyun of 601, and the other starting with the Zhongyuan Yinyun of 1324. The former marks the beginning of Middle Chinese, and the latter marks the beginning of Old Mandarin. Both of these systems, as well as reconstructed Old Chinese, should be understood as ideal phonological standards and composite in nature. Until modern times, phonological standards were never based strictly on the phonology of a single dialect. This book provides the first study written in English, of the phonological history of Chinese. It provides information about the standard phonological systems for each of the language's major historical periods, drawing on a range of historical materials such as dictionaries, rhyming tables and poetry, and is the reference book for understanding the key developments in the Chinese sound system.

Korean
  • A Linguistic Introduction
  • Sungdai Cho, John Whitman
  • Published online:
    14 November 2019
    Print publication:
    12 December 2019
  • In this accessible survey, two leading specialists introduce a broad range of topics in Korean linguistics, including the general historical background of the language, its phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, and the interfaces between those areas. Expertly written and drawing on the authors' many years of experience, the book answers questions such as what languages is Korean related to, what is unique about the Korean sound system, and how are 'subject' and 'topic' distinguished in Korean. It guides the student through the major issues in Korean linguistics in a theory-neutral way, at the same time discussing the latest research on the language, and exploring its unique writing system, which has long been a topic of interest to linguists and to those interested in writing systems in general. It is the ideal introduction for students both at the beginning of their studies, and at a more advanced level.

An Introduction to Modern Japanese
  • Volume 1, Grammar Lessons
  • Richard John Bowring, Haruko Uryu Laurie
  • Published online:
    14 September 2019
    Print publication:
    08 October 1992
  • This is the first book in a two-volume intensive one-year introductory course in Japanese, also suitable for those who wish to work at a slower pace. Students who finish this course will have a firm grasp of how the language works and enough knowledge of the writing system to tackle everyday written material with no more than a dictionary. Particular attention is paid to questions of grammar which foreign learners often find difficult, so Book One can also serve as a reference grammar. An Introduction to Modern Japanese uses both spoken and written forms from the outset. There are word lists for each lesson, and a comprehensive vocabulary for the whole course. Book One comprises fifty-two lessons which are accompanied by exercises and word lists in Book Two. The exercises ensure that the student has understood the grammar explained in the relevant lessons and give further practice in reading and recognising characters. Book Two also contains a full vocabulary, Japanese to English and English to Japanese.

The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese
  • Nathan W. Hill
  • Published online:
    22 July 2019
    Print publication:
    08 August 2019
  • The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the history of European languages stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records, e.g. Latin p- corresponds to English f- (pes, foot; primus, first; plenus, full). Although Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan have long been regarded as related, the systematic exploration of their shared history has never before been attempted. Tracing the history of these three languages using just such sound laws, this book sheds light on the prehistoric language from which they descend. Written for readers with little linguistic knowledge of these languages, but fully explicit and copiously indexed for the specialist, this work will serve as the bedrock for future progress in the study of these languages.

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