Southern Min (also known as Hokkien or Minnan) is a major branch of Chinese spoken mainly in Fujian and Taiwan, but also in Guangdong, Hainan and Hong Kong, as well as in many countries of Southeast Asia. Highly conservative in its linguistic profile, it is considered by many scholars to be a living language fossil due to the preservation of many archaic features that reflect its long-lasting history and culture. Yet to date there has been no comprehensive study of Southern Min using a typological framework, as the tendency is to base analyses on the model of Mandarin Chinese, the standard language. This grammar aims to present a systematic description of the Hui'an variety of Southern Min, mainly based on data collected via naturally occurring conversation. The volume includes four parts: nominal structure, predicate structure, clause structure and complex sentences, as well as a brief overview of phonology. It will have great appeal for heritage speakers, graduate students and scholars in both Chinese linguistics and typology.

Taiwanese Grammar: A Concise Reference is an unprecedented guide delivering clear, straightforward explanations of Taiwanese grammar while offering insightful comparisons to Mandarin. Designed to be both functional and accessible, the text makes searching for topics quick and easy with fully cross-referenced entries and a comprehensive index. Topics covered range broadly from parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.) to grammatical topics (aspect, negation, passive voice, etc.) to special topics (terms of address, pronunciation, time, etc.). This text is ideal for self-study and enables students at all levels to learn Taiwanese by building a solid foundation in grammar. Taiwanese (also known as Hokkien, Fookien, Amoy, Southern Min, or Fukienese) along with its variants is spoken by over 40 million people worldwide and is a member of the Chinese language family. Features of this text include: • Easy-to-use reference guide with cross-referenced entries and a comprehensive index • 1000+ example sentences using everyday vocabulary rendered in Taiwanese, Mandarin Chinese, and English • Character script for Taiwanese in accordance with the official selection of Taiwanese Characters by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education (2007) • Romanization provided for both Taiwanese (Pe̍h-ōe-jī) and Mandarin Chinese (Hànyǔ Pīnyīn) • In-depth guide to pronunciation using English approximations and full explanations on rules for changing tones (tone sandhi) Tags: Taiwanese, learn Taiwanese, learning Taiwanese, Taiwanese language, Taiwanese grammar, Hokkien, learning Hokkien, Amoy, Southern Min, Fukienese, Fookien, Min nan

This book presents multilingualism as a social phenomenon, which arises when speakers of a different language move to a new society and learn to speak the dominant language of the society. It offers case studies of Hokkien migrating families when they encounter new languages in Burma, Macao and San Francisco, showing how a family changes across generations from monolingual to bilingual/multilingual and back to monolingual. In the process language shift occurs as a result of transitional bilingualism. The dynamic status of Hokkien is also attested at the societal level in Singapore, Taiwan and south Fujian, the homeland of Hokkien.

This book lies at the crossroads of areal typology, language contact and genetic affiliation. Concerned with mainland Southeast Asia in particular, the various grammatical sketches lay emphasis on characteristics shared by unrelated languages.

An incisive, multi-faceted study of a Spanish-Chinese manuscript grammar of the seventeenth century, The Language of the Sangleys presents a fascinating, new chapter in the history of Chinese and general linguistics.

This is the first comprehensive grammar of Shaowu, a Min language spoken in Shaowu city and its environs in northwestern Fujian province, China. The book offers first-hand linguistic data collected over four years in the field, now placed at the disposal of researchers and students working in language documentation, comparative linguistics and Sinitic typology. It can serve as a reference grammar for those interested in learning the Shaowu language, thereby helping to preserve it. In addition, the book provides insights into Shaowu's classification which has been widely debated, thus elucidating its genetic affiliation. The book first presents Shaowu's geography, demography and history. It then profiles the language's phonology and lexicon, before providing a detailed description of its syntax, notably on its nominal, predicate, clausal and complex sentence structures, which are the focus of the book. The typological profile of Shaowu is also treated with the conclusion that the language has Gan, Hakka, Mandarin and even some Wu overlays on its Min base. The Shaowu language serves an excellent example to illustrate the degree of hybridity a language can attain due to intensive language contact over time.

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the entire field from a multi-disciplinary perspective. All chapters are contributed by leading scholars in their respective areas. This Handbook contains eight sections: history, languages and dialects, language contact, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, socio-cultural aspects and neuro-psychological aspects. It provides not only a diachronic view of how languages evolve, but also a synchronic view of how languages in contact enrich each other by borrowing new words, calquing loan translation and even developing new syntactic structures. It also accompanies traditional linguistic studies of grammar and phonology with empirical evidence from psychology and neurocognitive sciences. In addition to research on the Chinese language and its major dialect groups, this handbook covers studies on sign languages and non-Chinese languages, such as the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan.

Contains eight papers that cover the areas of field-work, dialectology, and synchronic studies of segmental and tonal systems of the Chinese language family. These papers are related to the theoretical issues in: the SPE Model; Lexical Phonology and Morphology; Autosegmental Phonology; Metrical Phonology; and Optimality Theory.

Chinese Grammar at Work adopts a cognitive-functional approach and uses a corpus-based methodology to examine how Chinese syntax emerges from natural discourse context and what the evolving grammar at work looks like. In this volume the author weaves together an array of fresh perspectives on clause structure, constructions, interactional linguistics, cognitive science and complex dynamic systems to construct a grammar of spoken Chinese. The volume contains discussions of a large number of topics: contiguity relation, the roles of repair strategies in the shaping of constituent structure, non-canonical word order constructions, pragmatics of referring expressions, classifier constructions, noun-modifying constructions, verb complementation, ethnotheory of the person and constructions specific to the language of emotion, sequential sensitivity of linguistic materials, meaning potential in interaction, the nature of variability and stability in Chinese syntax from the perspective of complexity theory. The result is a volume that highlights the connections between language structure, situated and embodied nature of cognition and language use, and affords a true entrée to the exciting realm of Chinese grammar.

This book presents pioneering accounts by leading scholars of twelve central aspects of the grammar of Chinese languages. Deploying a combination of historical and typological approaches it shows the variety and diversity of Chinese languages as well as the extent to which these and their dialects differ from Mandarin. Each author provides full background information on the language or dialect under consideration including its historical and contemporary context. In her introduction Dr Chappell describes the history and geography of Chinese languages. "A must-read... a vital reassessment of the field which shows there is much to be learned by integrating historical study with dialectal investigation." Journal of Linguistics "Chappell combines typological observations of Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages with general linguistic theory in a most satisfying fashion... A very welcome, refeshing and exciting contribution." Cahiers de Linguistique Hilary Chappell is senior lecturer in linguistics at La Trobe University. Her published work includes The Grammar of Inalienability (with William McGregor, Amsterdam, 1995). She is currently writing a book on the typology of Chinese languages,