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Tones are the most challenging aspect of learning Chinese pronunciation for adult learners and traditional research mostly attributes tonal errors to interference from learners’ native languages. In Second Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese Tones, Hang Zhang offers a series of cross-linguistic studies to argue that there are factors influencing tone acquisition that extend beyond the transfer of structures from learners’ first languages, and beyond characteristics extracted from Chinese. These factors include universal phonetic and phonological constraints as well as pedagogical issues. By examining non-native Chinese tone productions made by speakers of non-tonal languages (English, Japanese, and Korean), this book brings together theory and practice and uses the theoretical insights to provide concrete suggestions for teachers and learners of Chinese.
Also available online.

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the languages of China and the different ways in which they are and have been studied. It provides authoritative treatment of all important aspects of the languages spoken in China, today and in the past, from many different angles, as well as the different linguistic traditions in which they have been investigated.

In more than 500 articles, written by major specialists in the field, the Encyclopedia offers a synthesis of the most important research in Chinese linguistics and up-to-date bibliographical coverage. As such it is the prime reference source for information on:
• the lexicon, syntax, and sound structure of the Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages of China, including sign languages
• the history of languages in China and their situation today
• the history of Chinese linguistics, both indigenous and Western traditions
• the sociolinguistic situation, language contact, and language variation
• psycho- and neurolinguistic studies on Chinese, including first language acquisition
• and many other aspects of Chinese and Chinese linguistics (e.g., Chinese in the diaspora, Chinese loanwords in other languages, history of lexicography, language pedagogy, etc.).
Author:
A Grammar of rGyalrong, Jiǎomùzú (Kyom-kyo) dialects. A Web of Relations is the first full length description in English of a rGyalrong language. Marielle Prins describes the phonology, morphology and syntax for one variety of these under-researched and threatened languages. From a host of examples and texts emerges a clear picture of natural language use, creating an enduring record and a great resource for comparative and diachronic linguists. Careful analysis of the data uncovers the web of relations between individuals and all entities in their environment, to which the rGyalrong people attach great importance. The informative, clear style of writing makes this book a treasure trove for linguists as well as other interested readers.
Volume Editor:
The authors consider new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy that are especially central to the new historiography of China and East Asian languages. Based on recent debates initiated by Sheldon Pollock’s findings for South Asia, we examine alternative frameworks for understanding East Asian languages between 1000 and 1919. Using new sources, making new connections, and re-examining old assumptions, we have asked whether and why East and SE Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Jurchen, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese) should be analysed in light of a Eurocentric dichotomy of Latin versus vernaculars. This discussion has encouraged us to explore whether European modernity is an appropriate standard at all for East Asia. Individually and collectively, we have sought to establish linkages between societies without making a priori assumptions about the countries’ internal structures or the genealogy of their connections.
Contributors include: Benjamin Elman; Peter Kornicki; John Phan; Wei Shang; Haruo Shirane; Mårten Söderblom Saarela; Daniel Trambaiolo; Atsuko Ueda; Sixiang Wang.



Collected Papers of Erik Zürcher
Buddhism in China gathers together for the first time the most central and influential papers of the great scholar of Chinese Buddhism, Erik Zürcher, presenting the results of his career-long profound studies following on the 1959 publication of his landmark The Buddhist Conquest of China. The translation and language of Buddhist scriptures in China, Buddhist interactions with Daoist traditions, the activities of Buddhists below elite social levels, continued interactions with Central Asia and lands to the west, and typological comparisons with Christianity are only some of the themes explored here. Presenting some of the most important studies on Buddhism in China, especially in the earlier periods, ever published, it will thus be of interest to a wide variety of readers.
With Translations into English, Burmese and Chinese
Author:
The northern Mon-Khmer language Wa is a group of dialects spoken by about a million people on the China-Burma border. The Dictionary of Wa documents the lexicon of a digitised corpus comprising the majority of extant printed resources in the two closely related de facto standard Wa dialects.
Approximately 12,000 headwords and compounds are translated and explained in Burmese, Chinese and English, with some 7,000 example sentences, similarly translated. The dictionary is alphabetised in the Wa orthography officially adopted by the authorities in the Wa Special Region in Burma, a revised and improved version of the spelling first devised for translations of the Bible in the 1930s; headwords are given also in the spelling devised for Wa publications in China.

Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium
Author:
In Signifying the Local, Jin Liu examines contemporary cultural productions rendered in local languages and dialects (fangyan) in the fields of television, cinema, music, and literature in Mainland China. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary research provides an account of the ways in which local-language media have become a platform for the articulation of multivocal, complex, and marginal identities in post-socialist China. Viewed from the uniquely revealing perspective of local languages, the mediascape of China is no longer reducible to a unified, homogeneous, and coherent national culture, and thus renders any monolithic account of the Chinese language, Chineseness, and China impossible.
Author:
The traditional Zhuang script is a character script based on Chinese, adapted for the purpose of writing the Tai languages of southern China and northern Vietnam. Mapping the Old Zhuang Character Script by David Holm, presents for the first time a systematic overview of such a script, based on a survey of traditional texts in 45 locations among the Zhuang and related peoples in Guangxi, Guizhou, eastern Yunnan, and northern Vietnam. Complete with 133 maps, it looks at patterns of geographic variation in relation to dialect, the domains of former native chieftaincies, the activities of ritual masters and Taoist priests, large-scale migrations, and the transplantation of garrisons of native troops. Internal evidence indicates the script has a history going back well before the Tang.
Author:
In Between the Lines Cosima Bruno illustrates how the study of translation can enhance our experience of reading poetry.
By inquiring into the mutual dependence of the source text and its translation, the study offers both theoretical insights and methodological tools that bring in-depth stylistic analysis to bear on the translations as against the originals.
Through such a process of discovery, Cosima Bruno elaborates a textual exegesis of the work by Yang Lian, one of the most translated, and critically acclaimed contemporary Chinese poets.
This book thus reconciles the theory-practice divide in translation studies, as well as helps to dismantle the lingering Eurocentrism still present in the discipline.
Author:
The apparent flexibility of words in Classical Chinese with respect to traditional word classes has always posed a problem in the description of this language and has caused much misunderstanding. Moreover, it has been long understudied, along with the closely related theory of Classical Chinese word classes. This work seeks to summarize previous research on this issue, re-orientate the discourse and construe a new interpretative paradigm that would lead to a more complex and realistic view. It is principally based on a multi-disciplinary approach and supported by the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics. The study deals with the very conception of word classes, but its focus lies in the analysis of verbal and adverbial functions of nouns.