Parts of Speech of Chinese: Review and Reformulation (SpringerBriefs in Chinese Grammar #1)

By: Dongmei Wang

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Synopsis: This book summarizes the main ideas to show that parts-of-speech of Chinese is the core issue of grammar research, while issue of verbs and nouns is the most important part. The views on them and their relationship directly affect researchers' understanding of many important issues in grammar research, such as the definition of nouns, category overlap, the compliance of head feature convention, and the nature of subject-predicate structure, among many others. Furthermore, such a problem may affect researchers' understanding of the whole theoretical system of Chinese grammar. This book provides a comprehensive and systematic review of the achievements of previous studies on Chinese parts-of-speech. It shows that many fundamental problems in the study have not been solved well. The fundamental reason lies in the fact that the model of "separation of nouns and verbs" established in Indo-European languages is not the right model for the study of Chinese grammar. From the perspective of the part-of-speech pattern of "noun-verb inclusion", many problems can be solved thoroughly.