Grammar West To East: The Investigation Of Linguistic Meaning In European And Chinese Traditions

Description

This book compares the historical development of ideas about language in two major traditions of linguistic scholarship from either end of Eurasia – the Graeco-Roman and the Sinitic – as well as their interaction in the modern era. It locates the emergence of language analysis in the development of writing systems, and examines the cultural and political functions fulfilled by traditional language scholarship. Moving into the modern period and focusing specifically on the study of “grammar” in the sense of morph syntax/ lexico grammar, it traces the transformation of “traditional” Latin grammar from the viewpoint of its adaptation to Chinese, and discusses the development of key concepts used to characterize and analyze grammatical patterns. Front Matter ....Pages i-xx Briefing: Key Issues and Organisational Features of This Book (Edward McDonald)....Pages 1-13 Prelude: Framing the Problem of Language and Meaning (Edward McDonald)....Pages 15-39 Language, Writing and Metaphors for Language (Edward McDonald)....Pages 41-58 Snapshot A: Dialectic; Analogy Versus Anomaly (Edward McDonald)....Pages 59-72 Language in Education and the Foundations of Linguistic Scholarship (Edward McDonald)....Pages 73-92 Snapshot B ~ Syntax; Pattern and the Way (Edward McDonald)....Pages 93-103 The Discovery of Language History (Edward McDonald)....Pages 105-125 Snapshot C: Characters and the Order of the Universe, Grammatical Form as the Expression of the Mind (Edward McDonald)....Pages 127-138 From Philology to Linguistics (Edward McDonald)....Pages 139-161 Interlude: Establishing a Modern Paradigm (Edward McDonald)....Pages 163-174 From “(Single) Articulation” to “Double Articulation”: Meaning ↔ Wording ↔ Sound (Edward McDonald)....Pages 175-187 “Parts of Speech” and “Word Classes”: Defining Basic Categories for Grammatical Analysis (Edward McDonald)....Pages 189-204 “Word Grammar” v. “Clause Grammar”: Separating Morphological from Syntactic Patterning (Edward McDonald)....Pages 205-216 Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations: Structure and System (Edward McDonald)....Pages 217-226 Postlude: Reflections on the Long Twentieth Century of Linguistics (Edward McDonald)....Pages 227-239 Debriefing: The History of Linguistics and the Study of Language (Edward McDonald)....Pages 241-256 Back Matter ....Pages 257-275