Description: This textbook provides a cohesive and comprehensive introduction to Chinese linguistics for all undergraduate and postgraduate students of Chinese.
Review Quotes:
"Understanding the Chinese Language is an excellent introductory textbook for Chinese linguistics. This book provides a systematic, in-depth, and seminal explanation of Chinese linguistics and its efforts in comparing English and Chinese and using vivid and authentic examples make it very accessible." Han Luo, Northwestern University, USA
"Teaching Chinese linguistics can be very challenging but this book has made the task a lot easier. Dr Shei's use of authentic data (language used on TV reality shows and messages on social networks) to illustrate how the Chinese language really works is highly effective. He skilfully adopts various linguistic frameworks to examine Chinese sentence types. He also proposes new approaches, which include using concepts to define Chinese lexical items (i.e. words). Anybody who is interested in understanding how the Chinese language works will benefit from reading this book." Kan Qian, The Open University, UK.