Father Iakinf Bičurin’s theory of mental inflection in Chinese

Abstract

Summary The article deals with the highly original idea of mental inflection [умственное словоизменение] in Chinese put forward by the prominent nineteenth-century Russian sinologist Nikita (比丘林, Father Iakinf or Hyacinthus) Bičurin (1777–1853) in his Kitajskaja Grammatika (1835) and other language-related works. The concept refers to the internal features of Chinese morphology which compensate for the absence of common grammatical inflection. Fostered in an Humboldtian spirit, the theory established a link between covert categories and their surface representations a century before functional syntax appeared on the linguistic stage.