A Synchronic and Diachronic Study of the Grammar of the Chinese Xiang Dialects

The discussions in this book raise new issues on dialect research which have not yet been fully acknowledged by Chinese dialectologists. The author shows, for example, how the earlier layers of grammar may be reconstructed on the basis of modern data, and how the path of grammaticalization of functional words may be traced. The discussions reveal that the Xiang dialect group forms a transitional zone between northern and southern dialects. The syntactic constructions in these two areas often co-exist or are mingled in Xiang. Thus, the grammatical constructions in different localities of the Xiang dialect group often provide a bridge connecting the constructions of northern and southern Chinese, or Modern Chinese and Chinese of earlier periods.

This book is of interest to scholars and students who are working on grammar, dialectology, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, typological linguistics, and grammaticalization, as well as those researchers focusing on language policy, language acquisition, and education.