Chapter 3 of Discourse Syntax (Non-Canonical Beginnings) introduces students to sentences with non-canonical beginnings, which we define as the non-canonical placement of a core element of the clause to the left of the subject. Students learn to differentiate between topicalization, left-dislocation, and sentence-initial adjuncts, as well as different types of inversion, including locative inversion, and are introduced to how these syntactic patterns are used to structure the discourse – establishing topics, packaging information, providing signposts – and under which discourse conditions they occur. Woven into these explanations are data from current research in the text-linguistic and variationist approach and attestations from freely available corpora.

Phonological awareness refers to a speaker’s knowledge of the phonological structure of the language. The study of phonological awareness has traditionally been associated with the study of reading. As reading Chinese involves an orthography that does not directly encode phonology, the issue of phonological awareness in Chinese speakers and learners has been an intriguing issue. In this chapter, we examine this issue by synthesizing research from reading, orthography, phonology, and, most crucially, from recent studies in Chinese linguistics. In the process, we identify several strong arguments for phonological awareness for Mandarin speakers.

Current studies of semantic word formation of Chinese compounds aim to work out collocational patterns and semantic patterns. In addition to investigating the surface semantic relations among the composing morphemes of compound words, researchers adopt the methods of semantic-syntactic analyses of sentences and study the predicative relation among the composing morphemes. Rather than introducing argument structure, it might be better to make use of qualia structure to analyze the semantic structure of nominal compounds.

This chapter reviews the descriptive patterns of tone sandhi in Chinese dialects along with the experimental investigations of what generalizations native speakers make regarding these patterns, how they process them in production and perception, and how children acquire these patterns. Theoretical issues that tone sandhi sheds light on, including the role of typology in synchronic theories, feature representation, productivity and learnability, and the interface between phonology and other domains such as phonetics, processing, and morphosyntax, are also discussed briefly. The chapter focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of tone sandhi research and calls on researchers to take an open and synergistic approach among different methods to gain an comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

This chapter reviews studies on contextual tonal variation in Chinese languages, often referred to as ‘tonal coarticulation’ in the literature. We start by explaining why the term ‘contextual variation’ is preferred to ‘coarticulation’ for tones, before introducing different types of contextual variation observed in Chinese languages. The following processes are covered: assimilatory vs. dissimilatory carryover effects, anticipatory effects, microprosodic effects, and pre-planning effects. Next, three debated issues in Chinese linguistics related to contextual variation are discussed. First, are dynamic tones (e.g., rise, fall) underlyingly dynamic or made up of sequences of static tones (e.g., Low-High)? Second, are tones hosted in the rhyme or across an entire syllable? Third, does the Mandarin neutral tone have an underlying target or is it unspecified? Different views on these issues are presented with suggestions on how some of them may be tested and falsified.

In this chapter, we present a general picture of how topicalization and topicality can be defined in morphosyntactic terms. We start with an overview of the syntax and semantics of topics from the vantage point of generative syntax and formal logic. We then show that the notion of topic prominence can be defined by typological correlations through a systematic survey across languages. By applying objective tests to sort out the ‘grey areas’ or the spectrum effects of topicality, this line of research may well contribute to our pursuit of an optimal solution to the mystery of linguistic variations: Both the macro-parameter setting of analyticity and the micro-parameter setting of null topic are to be justified on empirical grounds, which, if so justified, will provide an explicit account of the inner working of topicalization, as well as its interaction with other types of syntactic mechanisms such as pro-drop and focalization.

The purpose of classifying words into parts of speech is to better represent how they combine with each other. From a structural point of view, this chapter introduces the principles of defining parts of speech in Chinese and gives the details of how they are defined. The overlapping of parts of speech is examined, with an extended discussion about how to handle the overlapping classes. Studies on the same issue but from other perspectives are briefly reviewed.

The concepts being discussed in this chapter are bound morpheme, free morpheme, root, affix, semi-affix, inflection, derivation and their application in the analysis of Chinese word-formation process. The inflectional affixes include aspectual markers, plural marker, potential infixes as well as those involved in reduplication. Two major approached are presented in this chapter about the derivation of Chinese words. The essence of the morphological derivation approach is that most word-building blocks have equal status as free root and bound roots, except for affixes. Chinese words are formed with these roots according to morphological rules and the syntactic status of a word is determined by its head. The essence of the syntactic-semantic is that the majority of Chinese words are constructed according to syntactic rules in that the relationship between morphemes in a word could be described as conjunction, modification, subject-predicate, verb-object or verb-result. A few bound morphemes are treated as affixes since their semantic content has been bleached, and they form words with morphological rules.

In this chapter, we address the issues related to sentence grammaticality and acceptability. We begin with a discussion of the relationship between the two notions, and point out that despite the differences in theoretical conceptualization, the two notions, grammaticality and acceptability, are often confluent and that grammaticality is usually measured as acceptability in linguistic research. We then discuss factors beyond syntax that may influence sentence acceptability, including processing factors and semantic/pragmatic considerations. Finally, we discuss the measurement of acceptability, via either experimental methods or corpus-based analyses. To conclude, we show in this chapter how grammaticality, a seemingly purely syntactic notion, is often materialized as acceptability, which encompasses multiple linguistic modules that go beyond syntax.

Tone in Chinese languages is distinct in two aspects: (i) the complexity in the tonal make-up and (ii) widespread sandhi. The former is often attributed to underlying complexity in tonal inventories and the latter to triggers immediately adjacent to the sandhi site. Morphosyntax, though highly relevant, is often left unarticulated in the description of tonal inventories and processes. This chapter unravels four major aspects in which morphosyntax condition tonal processes (a) the licensing and/or generation of tonal contours, (b) the neutralization of tone, (c) the triggering and blocking of sandhi; and (d) the impact on tonal prosody. While phonological patterns in other languages are sensitive to the word- and post-lexical levels divide, it is the structural constituency that is often more relevant than syntactic category in Chinese tonal processes. Lest one overstates the power of morphosyntax, note also that morphosyntactic conditioning of tonal processes is likely mediated through alignment and interface with prosody structure. Thus morphosyntax plays not a deterministic role, but a substantially contributive one in the intricacies of tonal processes in Chinese.

Despite the complexity and variation of physical signals, human perception of a speech sound uttered by different talkers or in diverse contexts is amazingly constant. Nonetheless, the neurocognitive mechanisms of this fundamental human perceptual ability are not well understood. Even less is known about the neural bases of phonetic constancy. We present an emerging picture of this important issue based on accumulating behavioral as well as neuroimaging evidence from lexical tone studies. Lexical tone offers a useful test of various existing theories proposed based on segmental studies, because of its variable and dynamic nature. We draw evidence from a series of studies on the perceptual normalization of lexical tones to shed light on prior theories. We also discuss findings from neuroimaging studies which advance our understanding of the temporal and spatial neural signature of phonetic constancy in lexical tone perception. A new model is proposed which emphasizes that listeners extract and integrate information from multiple sources in a fast and robust manner, to help them achieve phonetic constancy.

This chapter aims to provide a careful examination of Mandarin Chinese classifiers from a syntactic perspective. A comprehensive overview of the distribution of classifiers is provided along with their syntactic analyses. A central conclusion of this chapter, following much recent work, is that there are two distinct structural configurations that numeral classifiers participate in, and that these structures can distinguish the type of classifier participating in the structure as well as its semantic interpretation. The syntactic analyses are complemented with formal semantic analyses of numeral classifiers.

After critically reviewing the conflicting theories of word-formation, the integral model in Li 2005 is presented which is shown not only to make a minimal number of postulations but also to cover a wide range of cross-linguistic facts: morphological causativization in Bantu and Semitic, compounding in Chinese and English, the resultative constructions in Chinese, and noun-incorporation in Amerindian. Underlying this chapter is the long-lasting debate in this part of linguistic theorization as well as the methodological implications of the integral solution.