This book contains new research essays of linguistic interface studies in or related to East Asian languages. Written by 14 colleagues or former students of Yoshihisa Kitagawa, it is also a book paying tribute to his decades of scholarships on linguistic interface studies. The chapters therein range from interface studies in syntax and other linguistic areas such as morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition, language evolution, and language faculty science. The languages under discussion are mainly East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but also include Jordanian Arabic and Spanish, under comparative studies with respect to East Asian languages. The book appeals to both seasoned and novice researchers in linguistics, East Asian languages, and modern languages.

'The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces' explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. This book shows how these interactions are reflected in linguistic and cognitive theory, considers what they reveal, and looks at their reflections in expression and communication.

Over the past two decades, Chinese as a foreign or second language (CFL/CSL) has been increasingly taught and learnt as an important language both within and outside China. Studies in the field have attempted to address deep-seated tensions between existing educational ideologies, concepts, strategies, and approaches and student learning process and performance, and between existent teaching methods and techniques and the globalization of Chinese language education.

The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics provides an in-depth exploration of a variety of interface phenomena in Chinese, a non-inflectional language, where to a large extent word order constrains its interpretation and defines its grammatical functions. Under the Dynamic Syntax approach, which takes the incremental left-to-right processing of linguistic forms to be a fundamental part of characterizing the relation between syntactic structure and semantic interpretation, a straightforward explanation is provided. The study features detailed analysis of a range of key grammatical constructions such as topic, passive, copular and cleft, where previous analyses were sought in pure syntactic, semantic or pragmatic terms. Clear and straightforward throughout, The Interfaces of Chinese Syntax with Semantics and Pragmatics will be of interest to graduate students and scholars of Chinese, linguistics and cognitive science.

Typical and Atypical Language Development in Cultural and Linguistic Diversity brings together state-of-the-art studies in both typical and atypical language development. Placing the topic in the context of cultural and linguistic diversity (CALD), the book offers readers serious theoretical consideration of the topic and provides implications for multilingual educational and clinical practices. The content covers a wide range of topics related to multilingual language development in CALD: typical and atypical language development in CALD, and the interface between both; the relationship between multilingual competence and academic performance in CALD; providing unbiased speech and language measures in CALD; and heritage and minority languages education in CALD. Each chapter outlines the core theoretical and practical issues and explores both theoretical and pedagogical/clinical implications in the area and possible future developments. This volume is an essential resource for all those who study, research, or are interested in multilingual development, educational linguistics, and clinical linguistics in the CALD context.

This volume is an important contribution to the theoretical and empirical study of the interactions of grammatical components in Chinese and other languages. With contributions by Edward L. Keenan, Henk van Riemsdijk, Alain Rouveret, and scholars in Chinese Linguistics, this volume investigates the common structural properties that may be considered as possible candidates for UG. It addresses syntactic and semantic issues such as anaphora universals over non-isomorphic languages, the role that the forces of attraction and repulsion play in the grammar of natural languages, computational and semantic aspects of resumption, the dichotomy between inner and outer reflexive adverbials, system repairing strategies at interfaces, the v-copy construction in Chinese, the scope of disjunction, interactions between focus, negation and event quantification, null object constructions and VP-Ellipsis, child language acquisition of nominal structure, word order and referentiality as well as second language acquisition of interface properties in Chinese double NP constructions. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of syntax, semantics, theoretical linguistics, and language acquisition, as well as scholars in Chinese linguistics.

This book presents comprehensive and rigorous research on the acquisition of Chinese negation by L1-English and L1-Korean learners within the theoretical framework of the Interface Hypothesis and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. The results from grammaticality judgment data (N=182) and learner corpus data (overall scale: 15.19 million characters) reveal multiple factors contributing to the variability in L2 acquisition at the interfaces involved with Chinese negative structures, including L1 influence, the quantity (input frequency) and the quality of the target input (input consistency and regularity), as well as L2 proficiency. These factors also underlie the detectability and reassembly of the [±realis] features encoded with bu and mei, the two primary negation markers in Mandarin Chinese, in different licensing contexts. Task modality (written vs. aural) seems to play a role in L2 learners’ access to explicit and implicit knowledge about Chinese negation, but the effect of task modality is constrained by other factors such as structural/feature complexity, L2 proficiency, and L1-L2 similarity. The approach of employing both elicited experimental data and authentic learner corpus data furnishes new evidence for the acquisition Chinese negation by L2 learners. The findings of this study are of significance to the examination of the Interface Hypothesis and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis in generative-oriented SLA research.

This third volume of the Interfaces in Language series brings together a collection of papers which were presented at the University of Kent’s Interfaces in Language 3 conference of May 2011. In line with the conference’s title, applications which held true to the interface theme were invited, yet no restrictions were placed on the way in which ‘interface’ was interpreted. A range of talks were thus included, some of which conformed to established demarcations within the discipline, others of which flouted them entirely and unashamedly. All were welcome. The result was a heterogeneous set of talks, interspersed with and complemented by lively discussions, confirming that the interdisciplinary setting staged was a successful way of cultivating discussion between linguists who might otherwise not cross paths. The papers chosen for publication here include both diachronic and synchronic approaches to language, generative and non-generative frameworks, as well as typological and theory-driven perspectives. The result can only be described as an eclectic mix. We invite the reader to decide upon its success.

The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics is the first comprehensive introduction to Chinese linguistics from the perspective of modern theoretical and formal linguistics. Containing twenty-five chapters, the book offers a balanced, accessible and thoughtfully organized introduction to some of the most important results of research into Chinese linguistics carried out by theoretical linguists during the last thirty years. Presenting critical overviews of a wide range of major topics, it is the first to meet the great demand for an overview volume on core areas of Chinese linguistics. Authoritative contributions describe and assess the major achievements and controversies of research undertaken in each area, and provide bibliographies for further reading. The contributors refer both to their own work in relevant fields, and objectively present a range of competitor theories and analyses, resulting in a volume that is fully comprehensive in its coverage of theoretical research into Chinese linguistics in recent years. This unique Handbook is suitable both as a primary reader for structured, taught courses on Chinese linguistics at university level, and for individual study by graduates and other professional linguists.