The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics

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.

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.