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Chinese Language and Discourse 8:2 (2017), 244–265. DOI 10.1075/cld.00005.mcd
ISSN 1877-7031 / E-ISSN 1877-8798 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
e challenge of a “lacking” language
e historical development of Chinese grammatics
Edward McDonald
In the eyes of early modern European scholars, Chinese was commonly regarded
as a “lacking” language: lacking its own grammatical tradition or “grammat-
ics”; lacking the complex morphology of the classical European languages; even
lacking its own “parts of speech” or word classes. In the late 19th century Ma
Jianzhong created a grammatics for Chinese by adapting the categories of Latin
grammar - and with a good understanding of the similarities and dierences
between the two languages - but the Chinese grammarians who followed him
have struggled with the question of what might be common to all languages and
what might be distinctive to Chinese. Ma saw a Chinese grammatics as a way
to ll a gap in the country's literacy education, and this applied focus has been
shared by most Chinese grammarians since, something which has tended to put
restrictions on their description and theorising. A historical perspective is thus
absolutely essential for understanding the practical and ideological problems
Chinese grammatics continues to face, and can also throw light on the general
challenge of extending “European grammar” to non-European languages.
Keywords: Chinese grammatics, Ma Jianzhong, xu ‘void’ v. shi ‘full’, history of
linguistics, ideologies of language
1. Introduction
e problem of developing a “grammatics” for Chinese, that is, a yufaxue 語法學
or explicit tradition of “grammatical study” as opposed to yufa 語法 the inherent
“grammar” of the language itself (Halliday 1996), is one that is at the same time
descriptive, theoretical, ideological, and in the most ordinary sense of that term
political, even geopolitical. For early modern European scholars, Chinese was a
language “without grammar”, by which they meant, more or less “without gram-
matical form”; and though that is of course an absurd judgment, it is worthwhile
e challenge of a “lacking” language 245
attending to the grounds on which it was made, because they are arguably still
inuential in how linguists and others view the language. For educated Chinese of
the late imperial era like Ma Jianzhong 馬建忠 (1844–1900), polyglot, student of
two cultures, diplomat, and patriotic scholar, it was a language “without grammat-
ics”, a gap Ma himself set out to ll by writing the rst native grammar of Classical
Chinese, published in 1898; an achievement greatly applauded by his friend,
prominent political theorist and proponent of modernization Liang Qichao 梁
启超 (1873–1929– see Bai 2012). For mid-century philosopher and linguist Gao
Mingkai 高明凱 (1911–1963) it was (simplifying somewhat), a language “with-
out word classes” (Gao 1953), a “reactionary” presumption for which he was duly
ridiculed and “struggled against”. For modern West Coast Functionalist linguists
Charles Li (1940–) and Sandra ompson (1941–), writing almost four decades
ago now (Li & ompson 1978), it was a language “without grammatical signals”.
It may thus seem, in contrast to perhaps the majority of languages that en-
gage the attention of grammarians and typologists, that the “problem” of Chinese
grammar is not one of a “richness” or even “incommensurability” that proves too
much for the limited resources of the Western grammatical tradition, but rather
one of a “lack”, an “absence” which leaves linguists groping for something to say
about it. It may also pose a historical puzzle as to why the Chinese scholarly tradi-
tion, unlike all the other major literate traditions on the Eurasian continent, never
developed a comprehensive framework for characterising the wording of its own
language. Given all the originary claims popularly made for Chinese civilisation,
one might (cheekily) ask: “Weren’t 5,000 years of Chinese culture long enough for
the Chinese to develop a grammar of their own?”
So in order to sketch the background to the historical development of Chinese
grammatics over the last century or more, we need not only to consider the usual
typological staples of morphology, word order, degree of fusion between gram-
matical and lexical morphemes, prominence of syntactic “subject” versus discourse
“topic”, and so on, we must also venture into the realms of history of linguistics,
and intellectual– even political– history. In doing so, I hope to show that the
problems confronting the researcher in this case are not in fact unique to Chinese;
it is rather that the situation of Chinese throws these issues into sharp relief. If
Chinese grammar exhibits, to draw on a favourite Chinese complementarity, a
plenitude of xu 虛 ‘void’ or ‘virtual’ and a poverty of shi 實 ‘full’ or ‘substantial’, this
should by no means be regarded as “unique”– to make use of an over- and mostly
mis-used trope– but rather understood as placing Chinese towards the far end of
a continuum on which all languages belong. If Chinese grammatics has proven to
be an ideological and political mineeld, then perhaps it is simply pointing up a
dilemma inherent in all linguistic description.
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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246 Edward McDonald
2. Adapting an “imported good”: Finding equivalences across linguistic
traditions
It would not, I think, be stretching it too far to say that for Chinese of Ma
Jianzhong’s generation, the notion of “grammar”– in Ma’s transliteration gelang-
ma 葛朗瑪– was a kind of conceptual bolaipin 舶來品 or ‘imported good’ which,
in much the same way as material goods such as railways and gunboats, could be
used to make the nation strong against foreign incursions. Having said that, Ma
Jianzhong himself, whose history we will examine in the next section, was almost
as bicultural as it was possible to be at the time, having been educated in his youth
in both the Chinese and European traditions, and having as an adult both studied
and worked overseas. In bringing the tradition of European grammar tradition
together with that of Chinese philology, Ma must have had a pretty good idea of
what he was about. So in order to understand what exactly it was he was doing
when he “imported” grammar into Chinese, we need to look rst at the evolution
of grammar in its home culture.
e notion of “grammar”, Latin ars grammatica, was central to the develop-
ment of the study of language in the European tradition. e original term, Greek
tehknē grammatikē, references the grammata ‘letters (of the alphabet)’ that were the
initial focus of the literacy process and hence the starting point of linguistic analy-
sis. ese ‘letters’ show a basic constituency relationship with syllabai ‘syllables’
which provided, in their turn the model for the relationship of syllables to lexeis
‘words’, and of words to the logos ‘sentence’. e Chinese pedagogical and scholarly
tradition also started from the zi 字 ‘letters’ of its writing system, but what each zi
represented was a complex unit comprised of a spoken syllable and a grammatical
word– hence the “monosyllabic” tag traditionally applied to Chinese. However,
the zi as ‘word’, and its relationship to ju 句 ‘sentence’, were given much less atten-
tion than the zi as (phonological) ‘syllable’ and its relation to metrical and prosodic
patterns in literature. So although both traditions incorporated a comparable basic
scale of constituents, their respective centres of gravity were quite dierent.
Such a basic scale of constituents was put forward in a major theoretical work
from each tradition, coincidentally at around the same time. Roman grammar-
ian Priscian, based at that crossing point between Europe and Asia that was the
imperial Eastern Roman capital of Constantinople, was summarizing centuries of
scholarship in the Graeco-Roman tradition when he claimed:
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 247
Quemadmodum
which-in-way
literae
letters
apte
properly
coeuntes
joining
faciunt
make
syllabas
syllables
et
and
syllabae
syllables
dictiones,
words,
sic
so
et
too
dictiones
words
orationem.
sentence.
‘Just as letters properly joined make syllables, and syllables make up words,
so too do words make up the sentence.’
Priscian (. 500 CE) Grammatical Foundations Prisciani Caesariensis
Institutiones grammaticae
At the opposite end of Eurasia, young scholar Liú Xié 劉勰 was producing a
groundbreaking theoretical treatise on literature where, in a chapter devoted to
the structure of text, he identied an interestingly similar scale of units:
夫人之立言，因字而生句，積句而成章，積章而成篇
fú rén zhī lì yán,
now person’s establish speech
yīn zì
based-on word
ér shēng jù,
conj derive sentence
jī jù
amass sentence
ér chéng zhāng,
conj become paragraph
jī zhāng
amass paragraph
ér chéng piān
conj become text
‘Now when one writes, on the basis of words (one) creates sentences, by
accumulating sentences makes paragraphs, and by accumulating paragraphs
makes texts’
Liú Xié (465–522 CE), Wénxīn Diāolóng e Literary Mind and Ornate
Rhetoric 劉勰著《文心雕龍》
If we interpret these two dierent scales in terms of the kinds of units they in-
clude– using a “commonsense” distinction between “writing”, “sound”, “word-
ing,” and “discourse” respectively– we can get a more accurate comparison by
lining up the two scales as shown in Table1 below, where equivalent units can be
read across rows:
Table1. Scale of constituents in Latin and Chinese linguistic traditions
Latin Chinese
kind of unit Unit kind of unit Unit
writing lītera ‘letter’ writing zi 字 ‘character’
sound lītera ‘sound’
sound syllaba ‘syllable’ sound zi 字 ‘syllable’
wording dictiō ‘word’ wording zi 字 ‘word’
wording orātiō ‘sentence’ wording ju 句‘sentence’
discourse zhang 章 ‘paragraph’
discourse pian 篇 ‘text’
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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248 Edward McDonald
e dierences between these scales are striking, but even their similarities hide a
deeper dierence. If we set aside the graphological units for the moment, Priscian’s
scale divides neatly into two units of sound and two units of wording, with the
“central” units of “syllable” and “word” the focus of most descriptive attention. In
the Graeco-Roman tradition, the units of sound were a focus mainly in the context
of initial literacy education, whereby possible sounds were discussed in terms of
their relation to the letters of the alphabet, and possible combinations of sounds
into syllables were listed in pedagogical materials. By contrast, the basic unit of
wording, the word, and in particular the inected word classes of noun and verb,
were subject to a great deal of classication and, in post-classical tradition, explicit
theorization.
In Liu Xie’s scale, by contrast, we must not set aside the graphological unit
of “character”, since it was the basis of an early and highly detailed pedagogical
and descriptive tradition. In addition, “syllable” and “word” also received signi-
cant attention, but here it was the syllable that was classied and theorized in ex-
haustive detail, eventually across two historical stages of the language; while the
word was considered mostly in its discourse contexts. What is also interesting in
Liu Xie’s scale is that there is only one sound unit, the syllable, which in practice
in Classical Chinese coincides almost completely with the word (only true to a
much more limited extent for Modern Chinese); followed by two units of wording,
“word” and “sentence” (in later practice, an intermediate unit of dou 讀 “phrase/
clause” was also recognized); and then, perhaps not surprisingly for this literary
context, two units of discourse, “paragraph” and “text”.
Such theoretical statements as these by Priscian and Liu Xie are signicant
but not, of course, determining of the overall trend of each tradition. e context
of Priscian’s statement was an argument for the utility of studying syntax in a tra-
dition in which, pedagogically and descriptively, the main focus was still on the
morphology of the word. His argument is underpinned by the claim that the same
basic relationship operates from the lowest to the highest level of the scale, a rela-
tionship captured in the theoretical notion of vox articulāta or ‘articulated sound’.
Similarly, Liu Xie’s scale of units corresponded roughly to those recognized
in the writing of prose; whereas in poetry a dierent scale of units, the yan 言
‘syllable, spoken word’ and the lian 聯 ‘metrical line’ were used. e Chinese tra-
dition overall was centred around the zi 字 in its three interpretations as graph,
syllable, and word: hence the three perspectives of wenzi 文字 graphology, yinyun
音韵 phonology, and xungu 訓詁 lexical semantics (not, it may be noted, lexico-
grammar). e graphological perspective was important in the interpretation of
old texts, which from an early time were preserved in a range of media; but was
also central to an ideology in which the “patterns” (wen 文) of the writing sys-
tem, as created by a minister to one of the sage kings and handed down via an
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 249
authoritative lineage, were seen as naturally related to the “patterns” (wen 文) of
the cosmos (O’Neill 2013).
e phonological perspective, necessary in the rst instance for reconstruct-
ing the rhyme categories of ancient poetry, and later greatly inuenced by the ad-
vanced tradition of Sanskrit phonetics introduced via Buddhism, became elabo-
rated to a degree of sophistication and technicality beyond anything else in the
Chinese linguistic tradition. In the absence of a direct means for the notation of
sound (although a method known as fanqie 反切 ‘reverse cutting’ was developed
to indicate the pronunciation of a character via the pronunciation of the “initial”
and “nal” respectively of two other characters), this operated in terms of abstract
phonological categories, and was based on a prosodic analysis of the syllable from
an opening posture, shengmu 聲母 ‘sound’ or ‘initial’, to a closing posture, yun-
mu 韵母 ‘rhyme’ or ‘nal’, and including transitions that could be ‘open’, ‘labial’,
‘palatal’, etc.
e lexical perspective was both textual, in terms of the exegesis of archaic
or specialized terms in the ancient texts; and lexicological, as embodied in a con-
tinuing tradition of encyclopedic dictionaries, including an early dialect diction-
ary. e obvious gap here, from a modern point of view, was the grammatical
perspective. Because there was minimal morphological complexity in the word
in Classical Chinese, despite some non-productive derivational processes derived
from earlier prexing and suxing, there was no obvious “form” at this level to
cause problems for learners or draw the attention of scholars.
What was found necessary, on the one hand, was an analysis in terms of what
we might call the “reading units” of zi 字 ‘word’ (syllable), dou 讀 ‘phrase/clause’
(non-nal intonation unit), and ju 句 ‘sentence’ (nal intonation unit): in other
words, units that facilitated the appropriately expressive recitation of texts, needed,
just as in the case of Ancient Greek, for successfully interpreting a writing system
that operated largely without punctuation. On the other hand, the challenge of
explaining the dierences between the various aspectual and interpersonal “par-
ticles” in which Classical Chinese was very rich gave rise in the rst instance to
the notion of (variously termed) zhuzi 助字 ‘helping words’ (normally translated
as ‘particles’ in English– presumably because of possible confusion with the usual
referents of its more accurate translation ‘auxiliaries’) and then to a distinction
between xuzi 虛字 ‘empty words’ and shizi 實字 ‘full words’, i.e. function or gram-
matical versus content or lexical words.
We can pass over the gradual development of each tradition through the
“medieval” period of roughly 500–1500 CE, in which both traditions, although
never entirely rejecting their pedagogical origins, increasingly became technical
specialisations, identied in Europe as “philology” and in China as xiaoxue 小學
or “minor learning” (oen also translated as “philology”). In the following period,
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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250 Edward McDonald
roughly between the 17th and the 19th centuries, both traditions became concen-
trated on a similar kind of intellectual endeavor, what in Europe was called “textu-
al criticism”, known in China as kaozheng 考證 or “evidential analysis”. It is to this
period, normally ignored or downplayed in most standard histories of linguistics,
that we must look for some of the main empirical foundations of modern linguis-
tics; as well as recognizing an area in which scholarly achievements in Europe and
China were very closely comparable and of an equal degree of sophistication.
What is striking in comparing “textual criticism” and “evidential analysis” is
how closely their ideological motivations coincided. Scholars in each tradition
were concerned to “return” to the original versions of canonical texts, and devel-
oped a whole battery of methods for subjecting such texts to a very ne-grained
analysis, using graphological, lexical and grammatical techniques to determine
whether all the parts of what had been handed down as a coherent text did in
fact belong together, and to identify possible interpolations or forgeries. In both
cases, ironically, this quest ultimately had the eect of transforming what had been
revered and imitated as “canon” into mere “history”, a development which, along
with the dramatic social, economic and political changes that gave birth to the
“modern” world, ended up undermining the ideological bases of their traditional
societies.
From a historical viewpoint, it is important to stress the empirical basis of the
linguistic traditions in both Europe and China that fed into modern linguistics,
not just because it shows the two traditions at a roughly equal stage of develop-
ment, but because it demonstrates the development of a recognizably modern
scientic ethos in both traditions. is empirical basis was one founded, like tra-
ditional linguistics in both polities, on the written text; but on the written text as
an archaeological and historical object that needed to be processed and analysed
before it could be interpreted correctly. us, although the kinds of writing sys-
tems involved, and to a lesser extent the kinds of texts, were very dierent, the
techniques devised to deal with them, and the empirical goals developed in the
process, were very similar.
As regards the theoretical and descriptive frameworks developed in European
and Chinese philology, although the diering focuses of analysis in each tradition
gave rise to very dierent concepts and methodologies, nevertheless at a higher
level of abstraction comparable kinds of work were being done. e scholarly
traditions of comparative grammar in Europe and historical phonology in China
were clearly very dierent, but both involved the identication of dierent classes
and subclasses of elements, which in both cases gave rise to the beginnings of
abstract categories such as the system. Both traditions, though from very dierent
directions, were also beginning to broach the area of grammar or syntax which, as
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 251
a more abstract kind of patterning than the more obvious variations of phonology
and morphology, was slower to be identied.
Furthermore, in both China and Europe, such scholarship was not merely
“academic” but had serious political motivations, precisely because it was being
carried out on the canonical or culturally “central” texts of each culture. In relation
to the Chinese tradition of evidential analysis as it reached its peak in the Qing
dynasty (1644–1911), Elman explains its signicance as follows (1984: 26–27, ro-
manisation adjusted and emphasis added):
Evidential research represented a mode of empirical scholarship that sanctioned
new, precise methods by which to understand the past and conceptualize the pres-
ent…. For the Qing scholar, what was at stake in his commitment to a philological
analysis of classical texts was both the validity of received opinion concerning the
nature of the Confucian past and the relevance of the past for the present. Could
textual scholars reconstruct the unadulterated truths of the sages before original
Confucianism had been sullied with Taoist and Buddhist doctrines by over six
centuries of Neo-Confucian scholarship? Could one throw a bridge across the
Neo-Confucian era and resume the interrupted conversation with antiquity?
Evidential scholars answered ‘yes!’.
Ironically, the highpoint of evidential analysis, the turn of the 18th to 19th cen-
turies, was also the time when the political fortunes of the Chinese state began to
decline, so that just at the moment when Confucianism may have been reinvigo-
rated by renewed contact with its roots, the whole basis of the traditional state was
being undermined.
Similarly, European philology originally developed in response to the dis-
covery or rediscovery of the classical texts of Greek and Roman antiquity during
the Renaissance, when European scholars wished to reconnect with the classical
humanistic tradition, minimising or ignoring the developments in the Medieval
period which had been carried out under the religious aegis of Christianity. Some
centuries later, it was precisely in relation to Christianity that philology took on a
much more political avour, when spurred on by new archaeological discoveries
in the Middle East, scholars began to treat the sacred books of Christianity and
Judaism with the same critical gaze, and to show that, far from being the seamless
creation of a divine spirit speaking through human writers, the texts themselves
showed clear evidence of being a palimpsest of documents from dierent periods
and traditions laid over each other.
e person who eventually brought European and Chinese scholarship on
language together, Ma Jianzhong, was familiar with both Chinese and foreign
learning, but as the transitional gure between tradition and modernity that he
was, justied his innovation very much in line with the native evidential tradition,
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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252 Edward McDonald
returning to the past in order to reinterpret, and thus better manage, the pres-
ent. is is how Ma anticipates objections that applying Western learning to
the Chinese Classics is a waste of time (this and following translations adapted
from Mair 1997):
We are beset from above and below, surrounded and spied upon by more than a
half-dozen other countries. It is a perilous situation! He who recognizes the task
at hand considers works that apply Western learning to Confucius and Mencius
as deserving only to be rejected. Our sons today concentrate on learning what
is necessary to catch up with the times. Why should they waste their spirit and
energy on that which others have spurned?
Why indeed? is is a very interesting historical question that needs to be ex-
plored further.
3. 不東不西: Initiating Chinese grammatics
e “responsible party” in the case of Chinese grammatics, diplomat and scholar
Ma Jianzhong 馬建忠, embodies in his own personal and professional biography
a classic case study of cross-cultural hybridity. Born into a Catholic family (his
elder brother became a Jesuit priest), Ma was educated not only in Chinese but
in Latin and French at a French Catholic school in Shanghai. In 1876 he went to
France to study international law and became the rst Chinese to achieve a bacca-
lauréat, followed by a doctorate in international law in 1879. Returning to China,
Ma joined a generation of Confucian scholar-ocials faced with the urgent task
of protecting China from aggressively expansionist foreign powers. Aer a profes-
sional career as protégé of reforming Prime Minister Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 which
included representing the Chinese government in Korea and South-East Asia, Ma
transferred his energies to the scholarly arena, devoting the last decade of his life
to writing the rst grammar of Chinese produced by a native scholar, 馬氏文通
Mashi Wentong or ‘Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar’ (to use the felicitous rendering of
Dr Lance Eccles, formerly of Macquarie University) published in 1898, in the same
year as that dramatic but unsuccessful attempt at political modernisation, the 100
Days Constitutional Reform.
Sharing the predictably ambivalent fame of most pioneers, Ma is as oen
praised for initiating the study of grammar in China as he is blamed for impos-
ing a Western model on the Chinese language. But his achievement was far more
complicated and his methods far more sophisticated than simply nding Chinese
equivalents for basic grammatical terms from the Western tradition such as the
“parts of speech”. If Ma had merely been blindly following the tradition of Latin
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 253
grammar, itself a close copy of an original Greek model, he would perhaps have
written 馬氏字法 Mashi Zifa [Mr Ma’s Art of Letters]– or more likely Magistri
Equi Ars Grammatica (Linguae Sinicae) [Master Horse’s Grammatical Art (of the
Chinese Language)]– rather than 馬氏文通 Mashi Wentong [Mr Ma’s Compleat
Grammar]. Just like its author, Ma’s Compleat Grammar was an inextricably inter-
cultural product.
In bringing together his political ideals and his scholarly breadth to create a
work that would combine native and foreign scholarship in a grammar for Classical
Chinese, the then written standard which was the focus of the educational system
and the language of bureaucracy, scholarship and “serious” literature, Ma had few
predecessors. He may have been familiar with at least one of the missionary gram-
mars– French sinologist Peyraube (2001) argues that the most likely candidate
was the Notitia Linguae Sinicae by Joseph de Prémare, completed in 1728 and rst
published in Malacca in 1831– but Ma was largely exploring uncharted territory.
His achievement might perhaps best be described as a process of taking two maps
of very dierent territories, those of Chinese philology and Western grammar,
and superimposing them on each other. It is hardly surprising if the t was not
always an entirely comfortable one: what is surprising is how usable the results
turned out to be.
Ma himself was very clear on how justied his decision to bring the two tradi-
tions together:
Oen have I pondered the evolution of the languages of those countries where
writing is drawn horizontally on parchment, such as Greek and Latin. When I
compare texts in these languages, I observe that their words are of dierent cat-
egories and that they are governed by the sentence. ere are xed and unvarying
rules for enunciating what is in the mind and for forming one’s thoughts. From
this I reasoned that the chief principles regulating our classics, histories, philoso-
phers and miscellaneous writings would not be dissimilar. Consequently, I ap-
plied these common facts to create a similar set of rules for Chinese.
It is clear from the evidence of Ma’s Compleat Grammar that while Ma was con-
vinced the Chinese language possessed patterns comparable to those of Greek and
Latin grammar, and so took the latter as a guide for his own system, he was by no
means a modern Procrustes. For example, the system of word classes set out in
the Compleat Grammar shows no hesitation in recognizing “noun” and “adjective”
as separate classes, a division not recognized until very late in many European
grammars (in contrast to Prémare, who groups them together as “nominals”).
At the same time Ma included what was, to Latin grammar, a completely new
class of grammatical “particles”, long recognized in Chinese tradition as ciyu 辭
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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254 Edward McDonald
語 ‘expressions’ or zhuzi 助字 ‘helping words’ or xuzi 虛字 ‘empty words’, which
perform the work largely done by inections in the classical European languages.
Ma starts his Ars grammatica in the traditional way by setting out the dier-
ent word classes: using a term he coined for Chinese, zìlèi 字類 or ‘word types’.
However, both his system of word classes and the denitions of each class, in large-
ly semantic terms, are far more systematic and interconnected than most compa-
rable European systems since the model put forward by Varro (116–27 BCE) in
his De Lingua Latina ‘On the Latin Language’. e notion of possessing or lacking
shìlĭ 事理 ‘material principle’ is rst used to separate the lexical from the gram-
matical word classes: shízì 實字 ‘full words’ from xūzì 虛字 ‘empty words’. Within
full words, there are nouns or ‘name’ words’ míngzì 名字 which “name all things”;
pronouns or ‘substitute words’ dàizì 代字 which are “used to refer to nouns”; verbs
or ‘action words’ dòngzì 動字 which “narrate the behaviour of things”; adjectives
or ‘state words’ jìngzì 静字 which “delineate the form of things”; and adverbs or
‘situation words’ zhuàngzì 狀字 which “provide a description of actions or states”.
Within empty words, there are prepositions or ‘introducing words’ jièzì 介字
which “link the meaning of two full words”; conjunctions or ‘linking words’ liánzì
連字 which “introduce and develop words and sentences”; particles or zhùzì 助
字 ‘helping words’ which “facilitate the reading of words and sentences”, and ex-
clamations or tànzì 嘆字 ‘sighing words’ which “express unsettled states of mind”.
A contemporary scholar sees Ma’s semantic approach to word classes as inevi-
table, given the sparse formal marking of Chinese (Chen 2015: 16):
Ma’s system was a product of a combination of the system of Western grammar
and the Chinese language. e system of Western grammar has Latin grammar
as its reference point and Indo-European languages as its object of description.
Western grammar has three important concepts related to structure: word classes,
sentence elements, and case.… ese three concepts…all have morphological
changes or formal marking in Indo-European languages and are easy to recog-
nize, but Chinese lacks morphological changes, so establishing these three con-
cepts in Chinese is rather dicult. e only formal marker Ma could use was
word order, so for other criteria he had to appeal to meaning.
Moving on from word classes, Ma denes the two grammatically relevant units of
jù 句 ‘sentence’ and dòu 讀 ‘clause’, distinguished from each other by the familiar
“complete meaning / incomplete meaning” criterion of Latin grammar, but which
systematized concepts that had long been in the Chinese grammatical tradition.
He then went on to identify several types of cí 詞 or ‘phrases’ which made up the
structure of clauses and sentences, and several types of cì 次 or ‘positions’ which
characterised nouns and pronouns. Two basic ‘phrases’ dened the structure of
the clause, the 起詞 qĭcí ‘raising phrase’ or subject (phrase) and the ycí 語詞
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 255
‘discoursing phrase’ or predicate (phrase), both of which were clearly adapted
from the Latin grammar tradition; and further types of ‘phrase’ were dened cov-
ering the familiar range of sentence elements.
Partly overlapping with this typology were the dierent ‘positions’ in which
nominal elements could appear: indeed from the point of view of contemporary
Chinese grammatics, Ma recognizes both a 起詞 qĭcí ‘raising phrase~ subject or
topic’ partially contrasting with a zhĭcí 止詞 ‘stopping phrase~ object or goal’ as
well as a zhcì 主次 ‘host position~ subject’ contrasting with a bīncì 賓次 ‘guest
position~ object’; though it is clear from his terminology that Ma keeps the two
sets of distinctions quite separate. Other ‘positions’ included the pair of zhèngcí
正次 ‘upright position’ and piāncí 偏次 ‘leaning position’ which covered modi-
ed and modifying elements, qiáncì 前次 ‘preceding position’ or antecedent, and
tóngcì 同次 ‘same position’ which covered elements in apposition. Although this
double set of concepts for characterizing sentence structure has been criticized as
superuous, Chen argues that this was a rational response to the paucity of mark-
ing in Classical Chinese, as well as foreshadowing later frameworks which separate
“syntactic” from “semantic” units (Chen 2015: 16):
Ma used order to distinguish “subject position, object position, head position,
modier position, fore-position, and apposition”, and apart from the relations of
“fore-position and apposition” which involved some semantic concepts, the other
elements basically involved no semantic concepts: this has many similarities to
the use in research on modern Chinese of noun ordering to recognize sentence el-
ements. Apart from this, Ma’s use of the two criteria of meaning and word class to
distinguish topic phrase, goal phrase, complement phrase, recipient phrase solved
quite well [the problems of] the semantic relations of agent, patient, recipient, lo-
cation, etc, and in fact already raised some of the issues involved in later research
into valency grammar and case grammar.
Adapting a European tradition which still covered much of the content of syntac-
tic structure in terms of its morphological marking by verb voices and noun cases,
Ma in his dierent ‘phrases’ and positions’ produced a hybrid of the two which
nevertheless in modied form functions as the basis of most modern descriptions
of Chinese syntax.
4. Ex nihilo res t: e perils of being a pioneer
What Ma achieved in his groundbreaking work could perhaps be most appro-
priately characterised by Lydia Liu’s notion of “translingual practice” (1995: xix),
which, as she explains, does not force an all-or-nothing choice of “explaining
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256 Edward McDonald
change in terms of either foreign impact or indigenous evolution”, but rather allows
us to recognise the Chinese scholar, deeply versed in both Chinese and European
scholarly traditions, strategically deploying concepts from both traditions in the
service of his scholarly and political project. Neither Ma nor his successors in the
eld of Chinese grammatics were blindly attempting to force Chinese grammar
into a European mold, and he and they deserve credit for a large measure of agen-
cy in how they accommodated both their native and foreign traditions.
However, as a pioneer, Ma was unfortunate rst in his untimely death in only
his mid 50s (aer a urgent all night session spent translating a mammoth telegram
from the Russian Court during the Boxer Rebellion), and then in political changes
that removed Classical Chinese from its hitherto unchallenged position as the
written standard, and perhaps also rendered ideologically vulnerable a grammar
of one “dead language” based on the grammar of another. Aer the modernizing
May Fourth movement of the late 1910s and 1920s, and as political sides in China
became more sharply drawn in the 1930s leading up to the outbreak of war with
Japan, Ma seemed to take on a symbolic role, ironic for someone who had been so
closely involved in the reforms of the late Qing, as the representative of (outdated)
tradition.
Characteristic of this attitude is a critique by linguist Chén Wàngdào 陳望道
(1890–1978), from Fudan University in Shanghai, who was a major participant in
the “Grammar Reform” wénfă géxīn 文法革新 movement of the late 1930s and
early 1940s. In his Preface to a collection of articles by the participants in that
movement (Chen 1943/1980), Chen identies a number of periods in the “prog-
ress of Chinese grammatical thought”, with the crucial dierentiator being the ex-
istence of “scholarly contact between Chinese grammar and Western grammar”.
Before that contact, there was only unsystematic work on grammar, whose main
achievement was making collections of glosses on empty words. Aer that contact,
however, came an initial period of imitation [mófăng 模仿] characterised by the
work of Ma and those inuenced by his framework, only aer which came the
culminating period of reformers such as those in the Grammar Reform movement
(Chen Wangdao 1943/1980: 491):
In the last decade, because the particular facts of Chinese grammar have gradually
come to light…little by little proposals have been put forward to create a system
of Chinese grammar in accordance with the facts of Chinese grammar, drawing
lessons from the new knowledge from abroad, and with reference to the formu-
lations of our predecessors, in a careful attitude of scientic methodology. is
period we can call the period of creation [dìzào 締造].
is statement by Chen is highly revealing of what I take to be several key “themes”
in the grammatics of Modern Chinese. e rst and perhaps most obvious theme
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 257
is an unproblematised progressivism. Chinese grammatics as represented by
Chen, although hampered by a long period of more or less scattered observations
on the wording of Chinese, followed since contact with “Western grammar” by
an overwhelming tendency towards the “imitation” of that model, in the previous
decade has nally begun to become “self-reliant” and genuinely “creative”. e fact
that this progressivism is working itself out through the creation of a new native
tradition based on foreign materials shows up one of the key paradoxes at the
heart of Chinese grammatics, both then and now.
e second theme is an unabashed positivism. All of the “Reformers” in-
cluded in the collection edited by Chen talk as though in rm possession of the
“facts” of “Chinese grammar”, and see their job basically as “uncovering” these
facts, without recognizing that all three notions are theoretically dened. ey fail
to understand that the kind of “theory” adopted will inevitably lead to dierent
“facts”, and so have trouble acknowledging Ma’s achievement as the sophisticated
meta-theoretical exercise it is. Because Ma’s “word class” zìlèi 字類 framework
described above, for example, incorporates elements of the native Chinese philo-
logical tradition, as well as broadly corresponding to the “parts of speech” familiar
to many Chinese from their study of European languages, most of its critics do not
see it as a framework so much as plain “fact”: to be “revised” and made more “ac-
curate” certainly, but not actually “superseded”.
e third theme, in this case one denitely shared by Ma as well, is an again
largely unproblematised applicationism. Ma’s fundamental motivation for writing
a grammar of Chinese, was to impart greater eciency to the educational process,
in a context where the standard written language of education and government,
Classical Chinese, diered profoundly from any of the modern “Chineses”, and
was moreover taught mostly through memorisation and wide reading rather than
explicit rules. Many of the Reformers were critical of Ma for choosing Classical
Chinese as his object, even though, at the time Ma was writing, calls for moderni-
sation were conned mainly to the writing system, and proposals for adopting a
modern vernacular written standard were more than two decades in the future.
Nevertheless they universally endorsed his applied orientation, without acknowl-
edging that the development of theory and description follows its own logic which
may not always benet from a direct attachment to applicational goals.
Aer signicant reforms during the 1940s and 1950s, none of which, however,
moved very far away from the boundaries drawn by Ma, a framework close to
that put forward in the key product of the standardization process known (signi-
cantly?) as the Provisional System for Teaching Chinese Grammar 暫拟漢語教學系
统 (Zhang 1956), has been accepted as standard for the grammatical description
of Chinese in Mainland China, and the issue of whether or not it is a suitable one
has been o the agenda until much more recently.
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258 Edward McDonald
is is not to say that the framework has stayed unchanged since the 1950s.
e following extract from an overview paper by a scholar widely regarded as the
“dean” of Chinese grammatical studies, Prof. Lu Jianming 陸儉明 from Peking
University, discusses some of the additions made to this framework in the rst de-
cade aer the reopening of the universities in the late 1970s (Lu 1989/1993: 215):
In the last ten or so years, modern Chinese grammatical studies have shown grati-
fying theoretical and methodological changes. No longer limited by traditional
practice satised with the analysis of sentence elements, new viewpoints such
as distribution, substitution, expansion, transformation of levels, etc, and their
related methods are being widely used…level analysis has been widely adopted;
transformational analysis has also been fairly generally used…semantic feature
analysis has started to be used…and there have been some attempts to analysis
grammatical phenomena from a pragmatic point of view. is essay exemplies
that, although some theories and methods in modern Chinese grammatical stud-
ies are basically drawn from foreign linguistics, particularly American descriptive
linguistics, this borrowing has been resolutely carried out according to principles
of pluralism and self-utility, and has been careful to absorb, adapt, remould and
modify use this framework on the basis of the practice of Chinese grammatical
studies.
is essay demonstrates an eclectic attitude towards new theoretical ideas com-
bined with a practical approach whereby new theories and their associated meth-
odologies are incorporated into, rather than replacing existing practice. us,
despite all the renovation, one gets the sense that the descriptivist base of the
framework itself is not up for discussion, and furthermore that it is no longer
seen as a “theory”, but rather as simple commonsense “practice”. Lu Jianming’s
description exhibits a clear conformity to the principle of what inuential early
twentieth-century writer Lu Xun 魯迅 (1934) dened as nalaizhuyi 拿來主義
“bring-here-ism”, which he contrasted with songlaizhuyi 送來主義 “send-here-
ism”: in other words, that the Chinese should be able to choose for themselves
what to borrow from outside, and not have outside solutions imposed on them.
e survey of grammatical research in China by Lu Jianming quoted above lists
a wide range of “foreign theories”, such as immediate constituent analysis (“level
analysis”), transformational analysis (of the Harrisian rather than Chomskyan
kind), componential semantic analysis and so on, that have been adapted in this
way. Such “theories”, really analytical methodologies, are seen as providing ad-
ditional tools for an already existing toolbox, much in the spirit of the rst at-
tempts to learn from the West in nineteenth century China, as enunciated in the
dictum Zhongxue wei ti, Xixue wei yong 中學為體西學為用 “Chinese learning as
essence, Western learning as application”. Ironically, in the case of grammatical
theory, the “Chinese essence” is itself largely a Western borrowing, as Lu Jianming
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 259
acknowledges, and this dependence on outside theories has been critiqued in the
work of Shen Xiaolong 申小龍 and others in the Chinese Cultural Linguistics
movement (Shen 1989a, 1989b).
5. e limits of accommodation
e kind of theoretical pragmatism demonstrated in the approach of Lu Jianming,
however, has its limitations. It depends on having a largely accepted basic theoreti-
cal framework– perhaps something similar to what Dixon calls “Basic Linguistic
eory” (Dixon 2010–12)– to provide the context into which new theoretical or
descriptive “tools” can be “tted”. And aer a while nalaizhuyi ‘bring-here-ism’
can become a trap if the “toolbox” never gets renovated along with the “tools”. In
the 1950s, Chinese grammatics was beginning to nd its feet, and alongside the
standardization and “normalization” work represented by the Provisional System,
there were also lively debates, carried on in the pages of the new national linguistic
journals, on controversial topics such as the nature of subject in Chinese, how to
recognize word classes for Chinese, and the construction of complex sentences.
However, these debates were not allowed to run their course: at some point, insti-
tutional representatives stepped in and indicated what they thought should be the
approved solution. e reasons for the nal “consensus” were oen as not political
ones, and so the critical and self-critical ethos Chinese grammatics needed was
not fully achieved.
e overall political atmosphere worsened as the decade progressed, and in
the following decade, the Cultural Revolution led to the universities being closed
altogether, as well as seeing many linguists, along with their companions in the
“stinking ninth category” of intellectuals, “struggled against”, rusticated, and un-
able to publish. Once the universities opened again in the late 1970s, it was not
surprising that many linguists had largely lost their appetite for controversy. In
Chinese grammatics, linguists by and large worked with a small set of descrip-
tive categories that were treated as “axiomatic” and unchangeable. ey neverthe-
less were able to achieve a wide range of descriptive coverage and a high degree
of descriptive detail, but within a relatively impoverished theoretical framework.
eoretical work did, of course, continue, and major works appeared such as Lü
Shuxiang’s Issues in Analysing Chinese Grammar 漢語語法分析問題 (1979) and
Zhu Dexi’s 朱德熙 Lecture Notes on Grammar 語法講義 (1982) and Answering
Questions on Grammar 語法答問 (1985), but it is perhaps fair to say that they
were largely concerned with rationalizing and justifying the current consensus
more than identifying problems with it.
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260 Edward McDonald
So when radical suggestions for change nally came, they came at rst from
outside the mainstream and they came accompanied by a whole lot of cultural
nationalist ideologies. e subject of the intellectual and ideological movement
known as “Chinese Cultural Linguistics” 中國文化語言學 is one that I have writ-
ten about elsewhere (McDonald 1995, 2002, 2005; McDonald & Zeng 2002), and
it makes a fascinating story, but here I will move onto the point in the late 1990s
to early 2000s when some of its tenets came to be adopted by the mainstream
(Xu 1997, 2001). e major gure here, the late Prof. Xu Tongqiang 徐通鏘, in-
deed came from the heart of the mainstream, the Chinese Department of Peking
University. Along with his colleague, the late Prof. Ye Feisheng 葉蜚聲, he had
written an Introduction to Linguistics that had been a standard University text-
book for decades, reaching a third edition in 1997; but at the same time he and
Ye had also begun to critique the current consensus. In an updated version of the
textbook written aer Ye’s untimely death, Xu took the radical step of dividing the
book into two main parts: one putting forward categories and terms for the analy-
sis of Chinese; another doing the same for “Indo-European languages”.
In his Preface to the textbook, Xu quotes Lü Shuxiang in raising the issue that
had become an absolutely central one for many Chinese linguists, the relationship
between “foreign theory” and the “reality of Chinese” (Xu 2001: Preface, 3):
Prof. Lü Shuxiang (1986) pointed out:
Where foreign theory turns, we turn with it. is is not a bad thing, the prob-
lem is no matter what the theory, it must be integrated (jiehe 結合) with the
reality of Chinese; however, the word “integrate” is easy to say, and it is not
unknown for this to mean a mechanical sort of procrustean application.
In a research project I carried out more than ten years ago, in which I used some
of the tenets of Chinese Cultural Linguistics as “touchstones” to spark reection
and critique from a range of linguists of Chinese, one of my interviewees summed
up this dilemma as follows:
中国語言學屬於“依附”的地位，“依附” 於西方語言學，它的理論方法都是
借助於西方語言學。
Chinese linguistics occupies a “dependent” status, “dependent” on Western lin-
guistics, its theories and methodologies are all borrowed from Western linguistics.
Or more pithily:
西方人提供理論方法；我們中國人就是運用
Westerners provide the theories and methodologies; we Chinese just use them.
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 261
As Xu comments:
In a word, our previous “integration” is basically this type of “turn with it” think-
ing, which makes it hard to unearth the characteristics of Chinese itself. e crux
is that to change the standpoint of our “integration”, we must use research into
Chinese as the basis from which to absorb the theories and methods of Western
linguistics that are of use to us. In recent years, research into Chinese has made
some important advances in this area, the most prominent being the reinstatement
of the “character” (zi 字) to the key position in the structure of Chinese: to hold
that Chinese has no such thing as word, but rather that “character” holds the key
place in the viewpoint of Chinese people, and that it is the basic structural unit of
Chinese (Chao, Yuen Ren 1976). e present Coursebook takes this position as the
basis from which to develop its discussion of questions of linguistic theory, to ex-
plore a way for the integration of Chinese and Western linguistics, to turn the focus
of research on to Chinese, and thereby hope to cast o the bindings of the “turning
with it” type of “integration” and nd a feasible way for doing research on Chinese.
So to an extent that may seem shocking to typologists, some Chinese linguists
were now claiming not only that the categories of Western grammar were un-
suited to Chinese– in a theoretically free world a perfectly reasonable claim–
but that Chinese needed a set of categories exclusive to itself. As Xu explains (Xu
2001: Preface, 1):
We need to have our own outline of linguistics for teaching purposes. What I
mean by “our own” (ziji de 自己的) is one that is based on the study of Chinese,
that uses a particular point of view to organise and summarise the results of re-
search into language, and on this basis to introduce the basic principles and basic
knowledge [of linguistics]; rather than summaries of books on Western linguistics
or compilations of Western linguistic theories with Chinese examples….rough
the accumulation and searching of over ten years, today we nally have some
preliminary results which I have written up into this Foundations of Linguistics: A
Coursebook. Although I can’t say this is completely “our own”, it can be regarded
as a step in that direction. Taking as key [the recognition of ] the character as the
basic structural unit of Chinese, it highlights research into the relationships of
sound and meaning in the basic structural units of language, and incorporates the
tradition of research into Chinese into the analysis of trends in the development of
linguistics, thereby summarising and organising the results of linguistic research.
I personally am sceptical that Chinese grammar, or any other Chinese cultural
production, can be helpfully regarded as “unique”, a term which, as used typologi-
cally at least, could only be an admission of failure. But I would contend that, for
good empirical and historical reasons, describing Chinese grammar does present
grammarians and typologists and other linguists with a signicant challenge: to
repeat my earlier description, one that is at the same time descriptive, theoretical,
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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262 Edward McDonald
ideological, historical, and political. Since Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar, the Chinese
scholarly tradition of grammatics has gone through successive phases of borrow-
ing terms and concepts from the European tradition, and modifying or even re-
jecting those same terms as not suited to the “facts” of Chinese. is pull between
adoption and adaptation continues to characterise the eld today.
So if we try to combine the historical perspective explored here with the
theoretical and descriptive diculties of describing the morphosyntax or lexico-
grammar of Chinese, what are the challenges for a grammatics of Chinese that
would be typologically oriented, in other words, “in dialogue” with the grammat-
ics of other languages? In this regard, we must reject outright the possibility that
there can be such a thing as a “pre-theoretical” or “untheoretical” description.
Pace Haspelmath’s (2009) notion of “framework-free grammatical theory”, or as
he characterizes it more accurately at the beginning of his paper, “framework-
free grammatical description/analysis and explanation”, Haspelmath is only able
to argue that there can somehow be description without theory– or description
without a specic framework– because the only theories he examines, including
his recommended “framework-free” kind, already share a huge amount of com-
mon terminology and a comparable conceptualization of language, eectively that
stemming from the generative tradition. If he had included other theories with
a quite dierent orientation, such as Straticational Grammar, or Construction
Grammar, or Pattern Grammar, or Systemic Functional Linguistics, it would im-
mediately have become obvious that their conceptualization of language, and
therefore the kind of grammars which could be written of individual languages,
would be very dierent.
While any description of Chinese, or any other language for that matter, clear-
ly cannot but be theoretical, I believe that beyond that it also needs to be explicitly
metatheoretical. e days of being able to work comfortably within any one theo-
retical framework, ignoring all others, I believe should be consigned to history. We
need to recognize that theories are not only provisional, they are also inherently
accommodational: that is, they are tools designed for particular purposes, and
they need to be redesigned once those purposes change or when they are recog-
nized to be inadequate to the task.
In regard to the institutional setting of Chinese grammatics within China, it is
unfortunate, and not just from a typological point of view, that linguistics is mainly
carried on in separate language departments, and that the Department of Chinese
normally has very little to do with the Departments of Foreign Languages. is
relative isolation seems to encourage a kind of cultural-linguistic exclusivism in
which various features of Chinese are claimed to be “unique” on the basis of little
or no evidence (as a sometime translator and editor I believe a simple change from
“unique” to “distinctive” would have a wonderfully mind-clearing eect here); and
© 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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e challenge of a “lacking” language 263
just as unfortunately various linguistic features are taken to be characteristic of a
mythical “Indo-European language (family)”– although admittedly linguists do
sometimes come straight out and call it by its “real name”, English (sic).
e fact remains that “Chinese grammar” has been a hard nut to crack: and not
only for linguistic reasons, for instance the predominance of xu 虛 ‘void’ or ‘vir-
tual’ over shi 實 ‘full’ or ‘substantial’ in its grammatical marking; and that age-old
Chinese philosophical complementarity is not a bad place to start in considering
how to approach the system of the grammar as a whole. For the historical reasons
outlined above, “grammar” was brought in as another kind of “imported good”
bolaipin 舶來品, introduced into the culture at a low point in its own self-con-
dence, and hence creating a dilemma as to how this “good” should be tted into
its existing system. If this suggests that typologists will need to pick up a few new
“tools” themselves in order to examine Chinese, and become more sensitive to the
broader intellectual context of the exchange of ideas, then that perhaps is some-
thing positive the Chinese experience will have brought to the eld as a whole.
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Author’s address
Edward McDonald
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