Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar

Download or read book Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar written by Edwin G. Pulleyblank and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar is a comprehensive introduction to the syntactical analysis of classical Chinese. Focusing on the language of the high classical period, which ranges from the time of Confucius to the unification of the empire by Qin in 221, the book pays particular attention to the Mencius, the L�nyu, and, to a lesser extent, the Zu�zhu�n texts. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar starts with a brief historical overview and a discussion of the relation between the writing system and the phonology. This is followed by an outline of overall principles of word order and sentence structure. The next sections deal with the main sentence types � nominal predicates, verbal predicates, and numberical expressions, which constitute a special type of quasiverbal predication. The final sections cover such topics as subordinate constitutents of sentences, nondeclarative sentence types, and complex sentences.