Unsettled Questions in Mandarin - (Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory) (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Mandarin Chinese has a long and distinguished tradition of linguistic inquiry, and contemporary research continues to explore its structure through a range of theoretical frameworks. Yet several core issues remain unresolved--particularly the functions of certain high-frequency grammatical morphemes. This work addresses those controversies by identifying the functional domains to which these morphemes belong. The analysis draws exclusively on the forms and functions encoded within Mandarin's own grammatical system, rather than relying on categories derived from modern linguistic theories or typologies.

About the Author

Meichun Liu, PhD in Linguistics (1993), City University of Hong Kong, is a professor and former head of the Department of Linguistics and Translation. She is dedicated to corpus-based, cross-disciplinary research and productive in publishing on Chinese linguistics, lexical semantics, and cognitive linguistics.

Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Ph.D. (1968), University of Warsaw, is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University of Colorado. He has published grammars dictionaries of several Chadic languages, monographs and many articles dealing with linguistic typology and theory, including Semantic Structures Encoded in Grammatical Systems and their Realizations (Brill 2026).