Preface and acknowledgements

This book is intended for researchers, instructors, and students who are interested in language comparison and linguistic typology in general and/or in the comparison of Chinese and English in particular. It can be used both as a reference and as a textbook. As interested readers can tell, the book covers core subareas of linguistics. On the other hand, I have to admit that there are certainly other topics and constructions (e.g. relative clause, comparative construction, and resultative construction) that I would like to include but have to leave them out due to time constraints.

The book grew out of a course that I have been teaching for about fifteen years. Therefore, I would like to first thank all the students who took the course, particularly those who asked thoughtful and challenging questions.

I would also like to thank, in alphabetic order, Artemis Alexiadou, Giorgio Francesco Arcodia, Mira Ariel, Peter Arkadiev, Bianca Basciano, William Baxter, Pier Marco Bertinetto, Betty Birner, Walter Bisang, Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Joan Bybee, Bernard Comrie, Vivian Cook, Bill Croft, Östen Dahl, Xiaoling Dong, Mark Donohue, San Duanmu, Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Heinz Giegerich, Tom Givón, Martin Haspelmath, Bruce Hayes, Larry Horn, Larry Hyman, Ian Joo, Mana Kobuchi-Philip, Randy LaPolla, Kening Li, Yuxin Liu, Zishuai Liu, Bingfu Lu, Shiming Lu, Marianne Mithun, Åshild Næss, Elke Nowak, Wenguo Pan, Jun Qian, Jiaxuan Shen, Chaofen Sun, Yanfei Wang, and Shiwei Yang for engaging in interesting discussions and/or providing valuable information and materials that are related to the comparative studies undertaken in this book. Among them, I am particularly indebted (i) to Larry Horn (my PhD dissertation co-advisor) and Jun Qian (my MA thesis advisor) for their abundant care and continuous support throughout these years and for their unwavering confidence in me and (ii) to Chaofen Sun for taking his precious time to carefully review the manuscript and provide encouraging comments and constructive suggestions that greatly benefited its revision and finalization.

Meanwhile, I am indebted to the dedicated Interlibrary Loan staff at The College of Staten Island, CUNY, particularly Dorothy Walsh, for their assistance with obtaining many articles needed for this study and for their continuous help over the years. Moreover, the writing of this book was facilitated by a PSC-CUNY Award (# 61627-00 49) that provided me with three credit hours of course release time in the spring semester of 2019 and enabled me to concentrate more on this project. I thank PSC-CUNY and the CUNY Research Foundation for this award and for their support.

The writing of this book took much longer than I originally planned and, for their enormous patience, I would like to thank Elly van Gelderen and Werner Abraham, Editor and late Founding Editor of the Studies in Language Companion Series respectively, as well as Esther Roth, Kees Vaes and Ymke Verploegen from John Benjamins. In addition, I would like to thank Susan Hendriks for her hard work, which was pivotal to the smooth production of this book.

The book was mainly written from a corner of a spacious living room and with various background melodies. If you read it carefully, you might be able to hear the flute, the piano, the clarinet, the guitar, the grinder, the TV, the singing, and the laughers from my three children, whom I thank for making my life more colorful and meaningful.

With utmost love and gratitude from the bottom of my heart, I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandpa Kun Li (李坤) and my grandma Pengyu Su (苏朋玉). My grandparents brought me up and we trusted each other without any reservation. While my grandma passed away in 2012 and my grandpa in 2020, they will forever live in my heart. It has to be mentioned that the pandemic affected everyone’s life, including mine. It was the pandemic that prevented me from traveling back to China when my grandpa passed away, and it was simply such a huge pity and it is something that will always sadden me. My grandparents exerted the greatest influence on me and I am forever immensely indebted to them for their selfless and unconditional love and care. I vividly remember the days when my grandparents waited for me at the roadside for hours and hours, waiting for me to come back by bus during the years when I studied in cities not so far from my hometown (of course, those were the times without cell phones and instant communication). I vividly remember Grandma telling me that, every time an airplane flew by, she would look up and hope that I was on it. Those were the years when I studied abroad in the United States. During those six years, we did not see each other once and it was not until I completed my doctoral studies that I visited my hometown again. I vividly remember that, when I had to leave home again, Grandma told me that she would hope that I would not come back again. Of course, that was not her genuine hope, and what she really hoped for was, of course, my staying home longer, never having to part again, and never having to go through this process of waiting for so long but leaving again so soon. Grandma and Grandpa, there are no words that can express my gratitude and indebtedness to you enough. I miss you, and I know we are always in each other’s hearts, no matter where we are.