The main objective of Chinese-English Contrastive Grammar: An Introduction is to familiarize the reader with a subset of the learning difficulties and common errors in ESL/EFL pronunciation and lexico-grammatical structures encountered by Chinese learners and users of English, in Hong Kong and beyond. It also helps readers understand some of the ways in which the Chinese language has undergone structural change as a result of Europeanization. The book begins with a review of Cantonese-English contrastive phonology and is followed by a detailed analysis of lexico-grammatical deviations found among Chinese ESL/EFL learners. It concludes with a brief history of the Europeanization of the Chinese language and a discussion of commonly encountered lingua-cultural problems encountered by Chinese users of English in intercultural communication settings. This book is written primarily for teachers and students specializing in language-related disciplines. Scholars who wish to understand the acquisitional challenges for Chinese students in the process of learning English as an additional language will also find the book an informative reference. ‘David C. S. Li and Zoe Pei-sui Luk’s brand new introduction to Chinese-English contrastive grammar covers a number of key topics and comes with copious data, abundant exemplification, and in-depth analyses. A must-read for all who are interested in the similarities and differences between the two languages, and why.’ —K. K. Luke, Nanyang Technological University ‘This is a book which has long been needed. Drawing on their own research and teaching experience, the authors have produced a linguistically accurate and insightful, but also very readable book. It should be required reading for language teachers in Hong Kong and the Greater China region.’ —Stephen Matthews, University of Hong Kong

This book introduces a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English syntax based on generative grammar. It covers major syntactic domains, including but not limited to noun phrases, verb phrases, the inflectional domain, the discourse-related domain and ellipsis. Based on the empirical data drawn from both Chinese and English, and recast in modern linguistic terminology, the book introduces various rules and theoretical modules from the generative framework to analyze the similarities and differences between Chinese and English syntax. The chapters are arranged such that the book moves from the easiest syntactic topics gradually towards the more complex and advanced ones. Each chapter includes a short summary of major points and references for further reading. Readers are not required to have background knowledge in syntax. The book can serve as a textbook or a reference book for scholars of Chinese studies, Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL), Chinese linguistics, comparative linguistics and theoretical linguistics.

This volume represents the first book-length corpus-based contrastive studies of major grammatical categories in English and Chinese, two most important yet distinctly different world languages in the 21st century, on the basis of large matching corpora of authentic spoken and written data in the two languages.

This book serves as an introduction to contrastive linguistics - the synchronic study of two or more languages, with the aim of discovering their differences and similarities, especially the former, and applying these discoveries to related areas of language study and practice. It discusses the principles and methods, and contrasts English, Chinese, German, and other languages at phonological, lexical, grammatical, textual, and pragmatic levels, focusing more on the useful insights contrastive analysis provides into real-world problems in fields such as applied linguistics, translation and translation studies, English or Chinese as a foreign language, and communication than on the discipline itself.

Contrastive Linguistics is the first book written by a linguist from mainland China on the histories and principles of comparing and contrasting Chinese and Western languages, specifically English. From Wilhelm von Humboldt's initial study in comparative linguistics to the present day, traditional scholarship in contrastive linguistics has taken a Western perspective and shown how foreign languages relate to the Indo-European language family. However, such a view has a limited scope, and there is an alternative history to contrastive linguistics. This book is an attempt by Professor Wenguo Pan to redress the balance in contrastive linguistics, comparing Western languages to Chinese, rather than vice versa. He provides a survey of contrastive linguistics in China throughtout the past century, and aims to open a window for the world to see what the new generations of Chinese linguists are doing in this exciting field, and to start a dialogue between scholars of different backgrounds and linguistic traditions. Contrastive Linguistics looks at the history of this discipline both in Europe and in China. Professor Pan presents a survey of the historical, philosophical and methodological foundations of the discipline, but also examines its scope in relation to general, comparative, anthropological and applied linguistics. This book will be of interest to academics interested in a new perspective on contrastive linguistics or Chinese linguistics.