Language Contact and Change in Chinese: 1 (Trends in Chinese Linguistics [TCL], 1)

The Series Trends in Chinese Linguistics is initiated by De Gruyter Mouton in cooperation with Commercial Press to make outstanding Chinese papers translated into English available to the international research community. All the papers are selected carefully from the most recent issues of highly-ranked Chinese journals. The series focuses on core areas of Chinese linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. It is a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, and it integrates the research on Sinitic languages and other languages of China in the typological scholarship on language diversity, language convergence and language development. The topical books in the series reflect strong research trends currently relevant to linguists in China. Frontmatter 2 Foreword 6 Contents 8 List of Abbreviations 10 Theory and fact – A study of the translated Buddhist scriptures of the Medieval Period from the perspective of language contact, by Hsiao-jung Yu 12 On the origin of the Chinese reflexive ziji from the perspective of the Medieval Chinese Buddhist scriptures, by Guanming Zhu 26 The origin and development of negative exclusive particles in the Chinese language, by Chirui Hu 52 The postpositions suo 所 and bian 边 in translated Chinese Buddhist scriptures of the Medieval Period, by Changcai Zhao 86 Variant reduplication and four-character state adjectives in Yuan Zaju, by Lansheng Jiang 107 The correlation between the Chinese purpose construction “VP + qu (去, ‘go’)” and SOV languages, by Yonglong Yang 136 On the Han’er Yanyu of the Yuan Dynasty, by Shengli Zu 160 A study of the special syntactic features in Yuan baihua, by Guangshun Cao and Dandan Chen 179 On the special syntactic features in the vernacular imperial edicts of the early Ming Dynasty (1368–1424), by Dandan Chen 202 The influence of language contact on word order of some minority languages in Southern China, by Yunbing Li 216 Second language acquisition and contact-induced language change in the history of the Chinese language, by Guangshun Cao and Hsiao-jung Yu 248 Postscript 265 Index 266 The book sheds light on the fascinating evolution of contact-induced grammatical features in Chinese syntax. For more than two thousand years, Chinese has been in large scale language contact with languages such as Sanskrit, Mongolian, and Manchurian. Originally published in Chinese in renowned academic journals, the contributions are made available for the first time to the English speaking world