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.

William Wang founded the Journal of Chinese Linguistics at Berkeley in 1973, and continues to be its editor. He was the Inaugural President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, founded in 1992. His writings have appeared in many specialized journals as well as in general publications, including Nature, PNAS, American Scientist, and Scientific American. He has held various appointments in China, India, Italy, Japan, and Sweden. He is the Chair Professor of Language and Cognitive Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley. Chaofen Sun is Professor at Stanford University and was Yangtze Scholar at Beijing Language and Culture University. His areas of scholarship are in morphosyntactic changes in the history of Chinese, sociolinguistics and Chinese syntax. He has done extensive research on Chinese historical linguistics, functional linguistics and Chinese language education.

About the Editors List of Contributors PART 1. HISTORY Introduction William S-Y. Wang and Chaofen Sun 1. The Peoples and Languages of China: Evolutionary Background William S-Y. Wang 2. The Classification of Chinese: Sinitic (The Chinese Language Family) Zev Handel 3. Sino-Tibetan Syntax Randy J. LaPolla 4. Proto-Sino-Tibetan Morphology and Its Modern Chinese Correlates Tsu-Lin Mei 5. Old Chinese Phonology Zev Handel 6. Middle Chinese Phonology and Qieyun Wuyun Pan and Hongming Zhang 7. Early Mandarin Seen from Ancient Altaic Scripts: The Rise of a New Phonological Standard Zhongwei Shen PART 2. LANGUAGES AND DIALECTS 8. Austric Languages Baoya Chen and Zihe Li 9. The Austronesian Languages of Taiwan Paul Jen-kuei Li 10. Tibeto-Burman George van Driem 11. Chinese Dialects Dah-an Ho 12. Min Languages Chinfa Lien 13. The Yue Language Anne O. Yue 14. Wu Dialect Shangfang Zhengzhang and Wei Zheng PART 3. LANGUAGE CONTACT 15. Language Contact and Its Influence on the Development of Chinese Syntax Guangshun Cao and Hsiao-jung Yu 16. Language Contact Between Chinese and Japanese: Peculiarity of Japanese in the Manner of Accepting Chinese Mitsuaki Endo 17. 2,200 Years of Language Contact Between Korean and Chinese Ik-sang Eom 18. The Influence of Buddhist Sanskrit on Chinese Xiangdong Shi 19. Language Contact Between Tibeto-Burman Languages and Chinese Feng Wang PART 4. MORPHOLOGY 20. Morphology: Morphemes in Chinese Jerome L. Packard 21. Tense and Aspect in Mandarin Chinese Meichun Liu 22. Chinese Lexical Semantics: From Radicals to Event Structure Chu-Ren Huang and Shu-Kai Hsieh 23. Resultative Verb Compounds in Mandarin Shiao Wei Tham 24. The Encoding of Motion Events in Mandarin Chinese Jingxia Lin 25. Profiling the Mandarin Spoken Vocabulary Based on Corpora Hongyin Tao 26. Modeling Word Concepts without Convention: Linguistic and Computational Issues in Chinese Word Identification Chu-Ren Huang and Nianwen Xue 27. The Uses of De ? as a Noun Phrase Marker Chaofen Sun PART 5. SYNTAX 28. Some Typological Characteristics of Mandarin Chinese Syntax Fuxiang Wu and Yancheng He 29. Topic Prominence Liejiong Xu 30. Referentiality and Definiteness in Chinese Ping Chen 31. Adverbs Yung-O Biq 32. The Grammaticalization of the Ba Construction: Cause and Effect in a Case of Specialization Chaofen Sun PART 6. PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY 33. Phonetic Study on Phonations in China Jiangping Kong 34. Vowel Distribution in Isolated and Continuous Speech: The Case of Cantonese and Mandarin Feng Shi, Gang Peng, and Yi Liu 35. Modern Chinese Phonology Lian-Hee Wee and Mingxing Li 36. Intonation in Chinese Yi Xu 37. Tone Xiaonong Zhu and Caiyu Wang 38. Tone Perception Gang Peng and Caicai Zhang PART 7. SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS 39. Language Reform in Modern China Ping Chen 40. Language Policy of China's Minority Languages Hongkai Sun 41. Chinese Writing and Literacy Feng Wang and Yaching Tsai 42. Design and Deliver: Teaching Students to Communicate T. Richard Chi 43. Chinese as a Heritage Language Agnes Weiyun He 44. Lingua Francas in Greater China David C.S. Li 45. Some Basic and Salient Linguistic Features Across Chinese Speech Communities from a Corpus Linguistics Perspective Benjamin K. Tsou and Oi Yee Kwong 46. Codeswitching Li, Wei 47. Gender Differences in Chinese Speech Communities Daming Xu PART 8. NEUROPSYCHOLOGI CAL ASPECTS 48. Early Vocabulary Learning in Chinese-Speaking Children Twila Tardif 49. Children's Early Production of Physical Action Verbs in Chinese Helena Hong Gao 50. Semantic Processing: Access, Ambiguity, and Metaphor Kathleen Ahrens 51. Neurocomputational Approaches to Chinese Ping Li 52. Developmental Dyslexia in Chinese Catherine McBride, Xiuhong Tong, and Jianhong Mo 53. Developmental Speech and Language Disorders in Children Hua Zhu 54. Hong Kong Sign Language Gladys Tang 55. Taiwan Sign Language: History, Structure, and Adaptation James H.-Y. Tai and Jane S. Tsay Index