The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.

1. Phonological awareness, orthography and learning to reading Chinese Jun-Ren Lee, Chu-Ren Huang; 2. Semantic awareness in reading Chinese Chia-Ying Lee; 3. Wordhood and disyllabicity in Chinese James Myers; 4. Characters as basic lexical units and mono-syllabicity in Chinese Chu-Ren Huang, Hongjun Wang, I-Hsuan Chen; 5. Parts-of-speech in Chinese and how to identify them Weidong Zhan, Xiaojing Bai; 6. Gaps in parts-of-speech in Chinese and why? Marie-Claude Paris; 7. Derivational and inflectional affixes in Chinese and their morphosyntactic properties Dingxu Shi, Chu-Ren Huang; 8. The extreme poverty of affixation in Chinese: Rarely derivational and hardly affixational Shu-Kai Hsieh, Jia-Fei Hong Hong, Chu-Ren Huang; 9. On an integral theory of word-formation in Chinese and beyond Yafei Li; 10. Compounding is semantics-driven in Chinese Zuoyan Song, Jiajuan Xiong, Qingqing Zhao, Chu-Ren Huang; 11. The morphophonology of Chinese affixation Yen-Hwei Lin; 12. Mandarin Chinese syllable structure and phonological similarity: Perception and production studies Karl Neergaard, Chu-Ren Huang; 13. Tonal processes defined as articulatory-based contextual tonal variation Yi Xu, Albert Lee; 14. Tonal processes defined as tone sandhi Jie Zhang; 15. Tonal processes conditioned by morphosyntax Lian-Hee Wee, 16. Tone and intonation Yiya Chen; 17. Evidence for stress and metrical structure in Chinese San Duanmu; 18. Perceptual normalization of lexical tones: Behavioral and neural evidence Caicai Zhang, William Shi Yuan Wang; 19. SVO as the canonical word order in modern Chinese Feng-his Liu; 20. SVO as the canonical word order in modern Chinese Sicong Dong, Jie Xu; 21. Semantic and pragmatic conditions on word order variation in Chinese Jeeyoung Peck; 22. The case for case in Chinese Yen-hui Audrey Li; 23. The case without case in Chinese: Issues and alternative approaches Yu-Yin Hsu; 24. The syntax of classifiers in Mandarin Chinese Li Jiang, Peter Jenks, Jing Jin; 25. The Chinese classifier system as a lexical-semantic system I-Hsuan Chen, Kathleen Ahrens, Chu-Ren Huang; 26. Syntax of sentence-final particles in Chinese Siu-Pong Cheng, Sze-Wing Tang; 27. Sentence final particles: Sociolinguistic and discourse perspectives Zhuo Jing-Schmidt; 28. Topicalization defined by syntax Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai; 29. An interactive perspective on topic constructions in Mandarin: Some new findings based on natural conversation Hongyin Tao; 30. Grammatical acceptability in Mandarin Chinese Yao Yao, Zhi-guo Xie, Chien-Jer Charles Lin, Chu-Ren Huang.