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A difficult case

A sketch of the different interpretations of the concept of ‘case’ in the early Chinese grammatical studies
  • Tommaso Pellin
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History of Linguistics 2008
This chapter is in the book History of Linguistics 2008

Abstract

Starting in the mid-19th century, Chinese linguists began to import the West­ern study of grammar by means of translation of Western grammar books. Until then Chi­nese traditional linguistics had produced hardly any research on language struc­tures. One of the most significant differences between the Indo-European languages and the Chinese language is the presence in the former of the phenome­non of grammatical case, often provided with a marker. The present paper deals with the different strategies Chinese linguists used to translate this notion they found in Western grammar books. Second, it highlights how they even tried to employ case in the description of Chinese, but in time this concept was radi­cally modified in order to fit the Chinese grammatical system. The texts in this study consist of a number of Latin, English and Chinese grammar books, written from the mid-19th century to the 1920s.

Abstract

Starting in the mid-19th century, Chinese linguists began to import the West­ern study of grammar by means of translation of Western grammar books. Until then Chi­nese traditional linguistics had produced hardly any research on language struc­tures. One of the most significant differences between the Indo-European languages and the Chinese language is the presence in the former of the phenome­non of grammatical case, often provided with a marker. The present paper deals with the different strategies Chinese linguists used to translate this notion they found in Western grammar books. Second, it highlights how they even tried to employ case in the description of Chinese, but in time this concept was radi­cally modified in order to fit the Chinese grammatical system. The texts in this study consist of a number of Latin, English and Chinese grammar books, written from the mid-19th century to the 1920s.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Methodological considerations, linguistics and philology
  6. Du Corpus représentatif des grammaires et des traditions linguistiques au Corpus de textes linguistiques fondamentaux 13
  7. The ‘floating’ linguistic sign 25
  8. ‘A term of opprobrium’ 35
  9. Methode als Grenze? 49
  10. Part II. Antiquity
  11. Grammatical doxography in Antiquity 69
  12. Über die Bezeichnung des Indikativs bei den römischen Grammatikern des 1. und 2. Jh. 93
  13. Rewriting the history of the language sciences in classical antiquity 109
  14. Part II. Renaissance linguistics
  15. Elements of a philosophy of language in Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana 129
  16. La conception de l’ordre des mots dans la Grammatica Latina de Caspar Finck et Christoph Helwig 135
  17. The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison 147
  18. Part IV. Seventeenth and eighteenth century
  19. European conceptions of writing from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century 169
  20. Lessons from literary theory 187
  21. Nachahmung und Schöpfung in der Barockgrammatik 201
  22. Leibniz as lexicographer? 217
  23. Du verbe actif au verbe transitif 225
  24. Metaphors in metalinguistic texts 239
  25. Les Méthodes au XVIIe siècle 251
  26. A propos des règles dans les grammaires françaises de l’âge classique 265
  27. La phrase expliquée aux sourds-muets 277
  28. The place of spatial case forms in early Estonian, Latvian and Finnish grammars 289
  29. Part V. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  30. Aproximaciones a la enseñanza del análisis 303
  31. A difficult case 317
  32. Relecture jakobsonienne de la distinction saussurienne langue/parole 327
  33. Ernst Cassirer’s and Benedetto Croce’s theories of language in comparison 341
  34. Tradition versus grammatical traditions 359
  35. An early sociolinguistic approach towards standardization and dialect variation 369
  36. Gender and the language scholarship of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the context of mid twentieth-century American linguistics 389
  37. When categories go back to parts of speech 399
  38. ‘Cultural morphology’ 409
  39. Interjections: An insurmountable problem of structural linguistics? 425
  40. L’espace linguistique en voie de (dé)multiplication 435
  41. Z. S. Harris and the semantic turn of mathematical information theory 449
  42. Name index 459
  43. Subject index 465
https://doi.org/10.1075/sihols.115.29pel

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Methodological considerations, linguistics and philology
  6. Du Corpus représentatif des grammaires et des traditions linguistiques au Corpus de textes linguistiques fondamentaux 13
  7. The ‘floating’ linguistic sign 25
  8. ‘A term of opprobrium’ 35
  9. Methode als Grenze? 49
  10. Part II. Antiquity
  11. Grammatical doxography in Antiquity 69
  12. Über die Bezeichnung des Indikativs bei den römischen Grammatikern des 1. und 2. Jh. 93
  13. Rewriting the history of the language sciences in classical antiquity 109
  14. Part II. Renaissance linguistics
  15. Elements of a philosophy of language in Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana 129
  16. La conception de l’ordre des mots dans la Grammatica Latina de Caspar Finck et Christoph Helwig 135
  17. The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison 147
  18. Part IV. Seventeenth and eighteenth century
  19. European conceptions of writing from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century 169
  20. Lessons from literary theory 187
  21. Nachahmung und Schöpfung in der Barockgrammatik 201
  22. Leibniz as lexicographer? 217
  23. Du verbe actif au verbe transitif 225
  24. Metaphors in metalinguistic texts 239
  25. Les Méthodes au XVIIe siècle 251
  26. A propos des règles dans les grammaires françaises de l’âge classique 265
  27. La phrase expliquée aux sourds-muets 277
  28. The place of spatial case forms in early Estonian, Latvian and Finnish grammars 289
  29. Part V. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  30. Aproximaciones a la enseñanza del análisis 303
  31. A difficult case 317
  32. Relecture jakobsonienne de la distinction saussurienne langue/parole 327
  33. Ernst Cassirer’s and Benedetto Croce’s theories of language in comparison 341
  34. Tradition versus grammatical traditions 359
  35. An early sociolinguistic approach towards standardization and dialect variation 369
  36. Gender and the language scholarship of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the context of mid twentieth-century American linguistics 389
  37. When categories go back to parts of speech 399
  38. ‘Cultural morphology’ 409
  39. Interjections: An insurmountable problem of structural linguistics? 425
  40. L’espace linguistique en voie de (dé)multiplication 435
  41. Z. S. Harris and the semantic turn of mathematical information theory 449
  42. Name index 459
  43. Subject index 465
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