Morphosyntactic Changes in Middle Chinese Symposium

Organized by Chaofen Sun, Asian Languages
cfsun@stanford.edu

Top row (left to right): Jeeyoung Peck, Cheng Zhang, Meilan Zhang, Chirui Hu, Bo Hong, Fangqiong Zhan, Ying Zou, Jin Cao, Jingxia Lin. Bottom row (left to right): Shengli Feng, Chaofen Sun, Tsu-Lin Mei, Guangshun Cao, Hsiao-Jung Yu, Dan Xu.

Leading scholars from China, Europe and North America have been invited to share their current understanding on theoretical issues in grammaticalization and lexicalization in the history of Chinese language. Middle Chinese constitutes a special period when, on the one hand, Old Chinese changed into a more analytic language where meanings became mostly represented by words and particles, thus diverging markedly from other Sino-Tibetan languages; on the other hand, several prominent morphological markers in Modern Chinese without Sino-Tibetan correspondences started to emerge in Middle Chinese vernacular texts leading to a more synthetic Modern Chinese. The invited scholars will report on their findings with respect to the contexts and conditions in Middle Chinese that might have been responsible for the development of many of the constraints in Modern Chinese syntax.

For conference schedule, March 14-15, 2008, CLICK HERE.

For consolidated abstracts, CLICK HERE.

SPEAKERS & ABSTRACTS:

Guangshun Cao, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, CHINA
The Use of Conjunctions in Alternative Questions in the Translated Buddhist Sutras in Middle Chinese

Shengli Feng, Harvard University, USA
On Morphological Function of Prosody and the Chronologies of Syntactic Changes in Chinese

Bo Hong, Nankai University, CHINA

Research on the Morphological Functions of the Suffix *-s in Zhou-Qin Chinese

Chirui Hu, Beijing University, CHINA

From Covert to Overt: An Influence of Lexical Changes on Syntactic Structures

Tsu-Lin Mei, Cornell University, USA
The Causative in Old Chinese and Middle Chinese

Jeeyoung Peck, Stanford University, USA

Predicting the Sentential Positions of PPs in the History of Mandarin: A Statistical Study

Chaofen Sun, Stanford University, USA

Resultative, Passive and Derivations

Dan Xu, Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, FRANCE

Plural Expressions in Classical Chinese

Hsiao-Jung Yu, University of California Santa Barbara, USA

The Syntactic Features in "The Sutra of One Hundred Karmic Tales"--the Identification of Its Translator and Dating

Cheng Zhang, Beijing University of Language & Culture, CHINA

The Development of the Middle Chinese Classifiers (Size/Shape and General Classifiers)

Meilan Zhang, Tsinghua University, CHINA

A Diachronic Study of the Morphology and Syntactic Distributions of the Chinese Instrumental NP