Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar [Paperback]

Charles N. Li (Author), Sandra A. Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 1989 | ISBN-10: 0520066103 | ISBN-13: 978-0520066106

This reference grammar provides, for the first time, a description of the grammar of Mandarin Chinese, the official spoken language of China and Taiwan, in functional terms, focusing on the role and meanings of word-level and sentence-level structures in actual conversations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Li and Thompson's book. . . is clearly ordered and convenient to consult."--"Journal of the American Oriental Society

About the Author

Charles N. Li is Professor of Linguistics and Chairperson, Linguistics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Sandra A. Thompson is Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Product Details

• Paperback: 713 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (April 20, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520066103
• ISBN-13: 978-0520066106
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #269,330 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good for syntacticians, poor for computational linguists, January 29, 2000

By 

L. Gerber (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (Paperback)

I have owned and used this book for about 6 years. The coverage is good, and there are detailed descriptions and discussion of each of the pheonomena covered. The greatest strength (for linguists) is the diagnostic tests used to demonstrate what lexical/grammatical category a word or phrase belongs in. The weaknesses are that a) it is not concise; b) everything is presented only in romanization; c) The descriptive terms are sometimes odd or outdated seeming. For example the chapter on "de" postverbal phrases has some long, strange title. To readers of current linguistic literature, these would more handily be classed as "resultative phrases" to capture the similarity with phenomena in many other languages. If you want a succinct reference/descriptive grammar (for example for developing computational linguistic applications) "Essential Chinese Grammar" by Yip and Rimmington is a better choice.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good supplementary reading, January 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (Paperback)

This is a good book for a student of Chinese at the high-intermediate level or above as a supplementary grammar. It's too long-winded and difficult to use as a practical look-up guide to help when you help forming a given sentence for your homework assignment. It's not a dictionary of grammar "how to's". The books by Yip and Rimmington are better for that.

Instead, it's good background reading on the "why's" of the language after you already know the "how to's". For example, you can read the chapter on aspect and gain a deeper understanding of the logic of why certain sentences work and others don't and where the subtleties lie. For this book is more of a scholarly, systematic analysis of Mandarin grammar than a "teach yourself" guide.

Li and Thompson are progressive rather than conservative in what they accept as sayable. Some sentences I've never come across in my several years of learning Mandarin. So I'm not surprised that some native speakers have called the grammar in this book wrong. The reason is that Li and Thompson haven't limited their grammar to reflect what's typical in Mandarin, but have tried to include what is POSSIBLE. They don't just include "standard Putonghua" but have included controversial uses and regional variations. In fact, Li and Thompson freely admit in their preface that some native speakers will disagree with some of the sentences in this book while other native speakers will disagree with other sentences. Mandarin has never been totally uniform and certain usages remain controversial and non-universal. I have often found textbooks disagreeing with each other. I also have found native speakers disagreeing with each other too.

As others have written, the tone of this book is scholarly, and not easily digestible, and there are no Chinese characters, only pinyin (but what's the problem with that? There is never any chance of mistaking one word for another since each Chinese word is translated into English). If you can live with these shortcomings, I recommend this book for more serious, academically-orientated students as a supplement to your other grammar books.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent supplementary reference grammar., May 31, 1999

By 

Roland F. Haag ([e-mail]) (Cleveland, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition) (Paperback)

If you are limited to a traveler's "501 Useful Chinese Phrases," or are involved in a crash course in commercial Chinese for business purposes only, this is probably not the book for you. If, however, you are enrolled in formal classroom study and/or are using one of the higher quality computer language instruction programs, you will find this a valuable tool in your studies. This volume does presume some linguistics (you might have to look up a phrase or two--like "sentence sandhi") however, this is not a fatal obstacle to profitable use of this book. The inclusion of incorrect usage along with examples of correct usage is a little quirky, but it is often valuable to see bad or ungrammatical usage along with proper grammar and how easy it is in some instances to fall into ungrammatical expression. All in all an excellent companion to the study of Chinese.