Quest for the essence of Chinese grammar

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Some key issues in the analysis of Chinese grammars in the past five decades are identified and discussed from typological perspectives. They include 1) the wordhood in「字」and 「詞」, and word formation; 2) parts of speech; 3) syntactic pivots (topic, subject, and object); 4) active vs. passive voice; 5) cognitive principles of word order; 6) SOV vs. SVO. Typological characterizations of Chinese are also summarized, pointing to the importance of understanding Chinese from perspectives of creole and sign language. Mental lexicon of「字」,「詞」and four-character idioms should be constructed with syntactic structures for the processing of reading Chinese. 摘要: 摘要本文綜觀過去 50 年來漢語語法研究的重要議題，並點出爭議所在。這些議題包含 1)「字」與「詞」的糾結；2)詞類的區分；3)「主題」、「主語」與「賓語」的角色；4)主動句與被動句；5)認知原則與詞序；6)基本詞序的爭議：「主語-賓語-動詞」，還是「主語-動詞-賓語」。本文也從語言類型學的角度來檢視這些爭議，同時建議更進一步從克里奧語與手語的特徵詮釋漢語語法，並使用以漢字為基礎的心理詞典探討中文閱讀，俾對閱讀理論有重大的啟示。