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In:History of Linguistics 2011: Selected Papers from the 12th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XII), Saint Petersburg, 28 August - 2 September 2011
Edited by Vadim Kasevich, Yuri A. Kleiner and Patrick Sériot
[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 123] 2014
► pp. 53–61

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Western grammars of the Chinese language in the 18th and 19th centuries

Studies on ‘cenemes’ and word formation

 | University of Grenoble
Published online: 29 August 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sihols.123.05gia
The development of studies on Chinese grammar was an important innovation of European sinology, as the systematic descriptions of the language were scarcely represented in native tradition. The genre of bilingual grammars involved adapting the methodologies elaborated for Western languages to Chinese. Even though the Western model was predominant, bilingual grammars progressively integrated aspects of Chinese linguistics. Moreover, in their attempt to give an account of the specific features of Chinese, missionaries and scholars also developed new categories and theories, absent both in Latin and Chinese traditions. In this paper, we aim to retrace the evolution of the Western grammars of Chinese during the 18th and 19th centuries, by focusing particularly on the interplay between the analytical models of European origin and the descriptive obligations for the specific features of the Chinese language.
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