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| List of maps | |
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| List of tables | |
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| List of figures | |
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| Preface | |
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| Major chronological divisions of Chinese history | |
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| Major periods of the Chinese language | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Historical background of the language | |
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| Prehistoric time | |
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| Oracle-bone and bronze scripts | |
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| Old Chinese (771 BCE to 220 CE) | |
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| Middle Chinese (220 CE to 960) | |
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| Early modern Chinese (960 to 1900) | |
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| Modern Chinese (1900 to present) | |
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| Modern Chinese grammar and its lexicon | |
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| Simplification of Chinese script | |
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| Formation of Chinese dialects | |
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| Northern Chinese (Mandarin) | |
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| Southern dialects | |
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| Phonetics of standard Chinese | |
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| Initials | |
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| Finals | |
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| Medials (on-glide) | |
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| Main vowels | |
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| Syllabic terminals (off-glide) | |
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| Rhotacization | |
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| Tones | |
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| Tone-sandhi | |
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| Chinese morphology 1 | |
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| Compounding | |
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| Derivation-like affixes | |
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| Prefixes | |
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| Suffixes | |
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| Potential markers -de- [Characters not reproducible] and -bu- [Characters not reproducible] as infixes | |
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| Inflection-like affixes | |
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| Perfective marker -le [Characters not reproducible] | |
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| Experiential marker - guo [Characters not reproducible] | |
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| Imperfective marker -zhe [Characters not reproducible] | |
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| Summary | |
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| Chinese morphology 2 | |
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| Clitics | |
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| Sentence-final particles | |
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| Locative particles | |
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| Reduplication | |
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| Classifiers | |
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| Informal kinship terms | |
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| Adjectives | |
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| Verbs | |
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| Beyond morphology | |
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| Summary | |
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| Chinese writing | |
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| Chinese characters | |
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| The history of Chinese script | |
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| The strokes of Chinese writing | |
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| Simplified standard script | |
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| Chinese language and culture | |
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| Cultural beliefs and Chinese expressions | |
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| Philosophical beliefs and Chinese expressions | |
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| Metaphors the Chinese live by | |
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| Politeness | |
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| Language contacts and borrowings | |
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| Neologisms and morpheme-syllable script | |
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| Summary | |
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| Chinese syntax 1 | |
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| Linear order, lexical categories, subcategorization, and semantic roles | |
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| Other lexical categories | |
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| Constituency | |
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| Selectional restrictions | |
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| Chinese pronouns and demonstratives | |
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| Negation | |
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| Sentence types | |
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| Interrogative | |
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| Imperative | |
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| Chinese syntax 2 | |
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| Nominalization | |
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| Relative clauses | |
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| Cleft sentences | |
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| Adverbials | |
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| The word order and semantics of some common Chinese adverbs | |
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| Adverbial clauses | |
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| Serial-verb constructions | |
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| Three types of serial-verb constructions | |
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| Causative construction | |
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| Prepositions | |
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| Flexible prepositional phrases | |
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| The comparative, passive, and ba constructions | |
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| Comparative | |
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| Passive | |
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| The ba construction | |
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| Summary | |
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| Phonetic symbols | |
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| Capitalized abbreviations | |
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| References | |
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| Index | |