The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics offers a broad and comprehensive coverage of the entire field from a multi-disciplinary perspective. All chapters are contributed by leading scholars in their respective areas.
This Handbook contains eight sections: history, languages and dialects, language contact, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, socio-cultural aspects and neuro-psychological aspects. It provides not only a diachronic view of how languages evolve, but also a synchronic view of how languages in contact enrich each other by borrowing new words, calquing loan translation and even developing new syntactic structures. It also accompanies traditional linguistic studies of grammar and phonology with empirical evidence from psychology and neurocognitive sciences. In addition to research on the Chinese language and its major dialect groups, this handbook covers studies on sign languages and non-Chinese languages, such as the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan.

William Wang founded the Journal of Chinese Linguistics at Berkeley in 1973, and continues to be its editor. He was the Inaugural President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics, founded in 1992. His writings have appeared in many specialized journals as well as in general publications, including Nature, PNAS, American Scientist, and Scientific American. He has held various appointments in China, India, Italy, Japan, and Sweden. He is the Chair Professor of Language and Cognitive Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley.
Chaofen Sun is Professor at Stanford University and was Yangtze Scholar at Beijing Language and Culture University. His areas of scholarship are in morphosyntactic changes in the history of Chinese, sociolinguistics and Chinese syntax. He has done extensive research on Chinese historical linguistics, functional linguistics and Chinese language education.

About the Editors
List of Contributors
PART 1. HISTORY
Introduction
William S-Y. Wang and Chaofen Sun
1. The Peoples and Languages of China: Evolutionary Background
William S-Y. Wang
2. The Classification of Chinese: Sinitic (The Chinese Language Family)
Zev Handel
3. Sino-Tibetan Syntax
Randy J. LaPolla
4. Proto-Sino-Tibetan Morphology and Its Modern Chinese Correlates
Tsu-Lin Mei
5. Old Chinese Phonology
Zev Handel
6. Middle Chinese Phonology and Qieyun
Wuyun Pan and Hongming Zhang
7. Early Mandarin Seen from Ancient Altaic Scripts: The Rise of a New Phonological Standard
Zhongwei Shen
PART 2. LANGUAGES AND DIALECTS
8. Austric Languages
Baoya Chen and Zihe Li
9. The Austronesian Languages of Taiwan
Paul Jen-kuei Li
10. Tibeto-Burman
George van Driem
11. Chinese Dialects
Dah-an Ho
12. Min Languages
Chinfa Lien
13. The Yue Language
Anne O. Yue
14. Wu Dialect
Shangfang Zhengzhang and Wei Zheng
PART 3. LANGUAGE CONTACT
15. Language Contact and Its Influence on the Development of Chinese Syntax
Guangshun Cao and Hsiao-jung Yu
16. Language Contact Between Chinese and Japanese: Peculiarity of Japanese in the Manner of Accepting Chinese
Mitsuaki Endo
17. 2,200 Years of Language Contact Between Korean and Chinese
Ik-sang Eom
18. The Influence of Buddhist Sanskrit on Chinese
Xiangdong Shi
19. Language Contact Between Tibeto-Burman Languages and Chinese
Feng Wang
PART 4. MORPHOLOGY
20. Morphology: Morphemes in Chinese
Jerome L. Packard
21. Tense and Aspect in Mandarin Chinese
Meichun Liu
22. Chinese Lexical Semantics: From Radicals to Event Structure
Chu-Ren Huang and Shu-Kai Hsieh
23. Resultative Verb Compounds in Mandarin
Shiao Wei Tham
24. The Encoding of Motion Events in Mandarin Chinese
Jingxia Lin
25. Profiling the Mandarin Spoken Vocabulary Based on Corpora
Hongyin Tao
26. Modeling Word Concepts without Convention: Linguistic and Computational Issues in Chinese Word Identification
Chu-Ren Huang and Nianwen Xue
27. The Uses of De ? as a Noun Phrase Marker
Chaofen Sun
PART 5. SYNTAX
28. Some Typological Characteristics of Mandarin Chinese Syntax
Fuxiang Wu and Yancheng He
29. Topic Prominence
Liejiong Xu
30. Referentiality and Definiteness in Chinese
Ping Chen
31. Adverbs
Yung-O Biq
32. The Grammaticalization of the Ba Construction: Cause and Effect in a Case of Specialization Chaofen Sun
PART 6. PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
33. Phonetic Study on Phonations in China
Jiangping Kong
34. Vowel Distribution in Isolated and Continuous Speech: The Case of Cantonese and Mandarin
Feng Shi, Gang Peng, and Yi Liu
35. Modern Chinese Phonology
Lian-Hee Wee and Mingxing Li
36. Intonation in Chinese
Yi Xu
37. Tone
Xiaonong Zhu and Caiyu Wang
38. Tone Perception
Gang Peng and Caicai Zhang
PART 7. SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS
39. Language Reform in Modern China
Ping Chen
40. Language Policy of China's Minority Languages
Hongkai Sun
41. Chinese Writing and Literacy
Feng Wang and Yaching Tsai
42. Design and Deliver: Teaching Students to Communicate
T. Richard Chi
43. Chinese as a Heritage Language
Agnes Weiyun He
44. Lingua Francas in Greater China
David C.S. Li
45. Some Basic and Salient Linguistic Features Across Chinese Speech Communities from a Corpus Linguistics Perspective
Benjamin K. Tsou and Oi Yee Kwong
46. Codeswitching
Li, Wei
47. Gender Differences in Chinese Speech Communities
Daming Xu
PART 8. NEUROPSYCHOLOGI CAL ASPECTS
48. Early Vocabulary Learning in Chinese-Speaking Children
Twila Tardif
49. Children's Early Production of Physical Action Verbs in Chinese
Helena Hong Gao
50. Semantic Processing: Access, Ambiguity, and Metaphor
Kathleen Ahrens
51. Neurocomputational Approaches to Chinese
Ping Li
52. Developmental Dyslexia in Chinese
Catherine McBride, Xiuhong Tong, and Jianhong Mo
53. Developmental Speech and Language Disorders in Children
Hua Zhu
54. Hong Kong Sign Language
Gladys Tang
55. Taiwan Sign Language: History, Structure, and Adaptation
James H.-Y. Tai and Jane S. Tsay
Index