Chapter

“Word Grammar” v. “Clause Grammar”: Separating Morphological from Syntactic Patterning

Authors:
  • The Compleat Wordsmith / 老馬文通
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Abstract

The current chapter deals with something that first became a live issue in the European tradition among French and German grammarians of the eighteenth – nineteenth centuries as they struggled to develop a new kind of grammatical unit, intermediate between the “word” and “sentence” of the Latin tradition, which they initially called groupe des mots ‘group of words’ (Graffi 2000: 136–165). In this chapter we focus almost exclusively on the experience of a particular group of twentieth century Chinese linguists to develop a similar category, a focus which will allows us to understand not merely the descriptive and theoretical challenges, but also the political and ideological pressures involved. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese scholars undertook a similar challenge in their attempts to bridge between the highly-developed descriptions of the word and its patterning in the Latin tradition and the relatively under-developed treatments of the sentence and its organization. The first port of call, as we have already seen in the previous chapter, was with the notion of word classes, or “parts of speech”, a notion which, as we also saw, originated as a mistranslation of the significantly different notion “parts of the sentence”. However, if we take this original concept seriously, the question then arises: if the ancient Greeks could see the words of their language, with all their complex inflections, as nevertheless defined primarily in terms of their role in the sentence, might it not be possible for the modern Chinese to do the same? The problem here lies in what tends to be perceived as the radical difference between the Ancient Greek language (and its modern linguistic or cultural successors) and the Ancient Chinese language (and its modern descendants): namely, that Chinese possesses only a minimum of formal markers to distinguish different kinds of words. This then raises the further question as to how types of words in Chinese are to be distinguished outside of – or even in – the context of their role in the sentence. And all the while hanging over this is the vexed intellectual and political issue that all these grammatical frameworks used for Chinese are in fact foreign borrowings.

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Chapter
After the publication of Li Jinxi’s “New Grammar of the National Language” in 1924, no new grammatical theories appeared in China for several years. Of the works introduced in the previous chapter, only Yang Shuda’s was published after Li’s, but this work belonged to the MSWT school and did not advance new points of view. Generally, books and articles on grammar published after 1924 either belonged to the MSWT school or adopted Li Jinxi’s system, the latter being dominant.
Article
In China, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first years of the twentieth century, extensive translation of Western works on science, economics and law was undertaken. The goal was to spread “Western learning”, thought of as the key tool for the industrial and military modernization of the country, among the Chinese ruling class. There was a strong sense of urgency, as the ultimate aim was to defend the Empire against the threat posed by the Western powers to traditional Chinese social and political structures. The translators necessarily had to create brand new scientific terminologies to express Western concepts. Among the texts translated in that period were also some works that introduced Western grammatical study into China. This paper presents the results of an inquiry into the lexical creations in the domain of grammar, as evidenced by three of the first Chinese texts dealing with this topic by Wang Fengzao, Ma Jianzhong and Yan Fu. The goal of this investigation is to find out, through an inquiry into the social and cultural context of the three essays, whether the socio-cultural differences between the environments these essays were embedded in had any influence on the invention of modern Chinese grammatical terminology. If some influence can be identified, then it must be evaluated through the assessment of the typologies of words involved in this process of lexification.
A history of modern Chinese linguistics
  • J Y He