Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar

by Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520066103
• ISBN13: 9780520066106
• Release Date: April 1989
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 720 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Much better than expected

This item is intended for serious scholars of Chinese (that is, people with some formal linguistic training) who wish a better understanding of the complications of Mandarin grammar. Li and Thompson discuss many of the difficulties in classifying the different aspects of Chinese grammar and are able to relate those discussions back to interpreting those constructs. Graduate students in linguistics-related fields will find this volume easier to read than most grammar books and more enlightening than might be expected. On an interesting note, this reference uses the pinyin alphabet in its examples rather than characters, an editorial choice that keeps it accessible to non-native speakers of Chinese. While I would prefer the use of characters, this preference doesn't detract from the accessiblity of the examples. Final note: If you're simply wanting to learn how to speak Chinese better, many of the discussions in this book will only be tangentially relevant to your goals. And if your interest in Chinese is hitting on Beijing locals while drinking in the Sanlitun area, buying a few rounds will accomplish that better than an inch-thick grammar book.

Exceptional source

The book describes Mandarin grammar very well. The explanations are a bit wordy, but understandable and the numerous examples are quite useful

A nice reference

True to the title, this is indeed a nice reference book on Chinese grammar, something I would like to keep on mybookshelf next to the dictionaries. It is easy to read, at least for a student with some experience of reading grammar books and a prior exposure to basic linguistic terminology. A large number of both positive and negative examples are helpful in making grammar rules easier to understand.Now, two minor complaints. First, if the authors were to preparea new edition, I wish they had used page space a bit moreeconomically. It seems that by slightly tightening spacing between the words in the examples, many examples thatnow stretch to 2 or 3 lines could be compressed into one or two.Doing this could significantly reduce the page count. Or, even better, the freed space could be used to give parallel text in Hanzi (Chinese characters) next to each example. One would think that with moder typesetting that would not be too complicated, unlike in 1981, when the book first appeared. While Hanzi are not strictly necessary -- tone marks and Englsih translation of every word allows one to look any word in a dictionary -- printing them next to the examples would provide additional visiual cues to those readers who already know their characters, and an additional opportunity to learn useful characters (e.g., the three different "-de" suffixes) "by osmosis" to those who are stilllearning.

Good supplementary reading

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.

An excellent supplementary reference grammar.

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.