Halvor Eifring

Clause Combination in Chinese (Sinica Leidensia, Vol 32) Halvor Eifring

This work is a documented study of composite sentences in Modern Chinese, their semantic properties and syntactic behaviour. It discusses the extent of language variation, the relation between synchrony and diachrony, the nature of grammaticalization, generality and gradience, and the non-uniqueness of syntactic analysis. The first part of the book provides a new categorization of clause combinations and clause connectives. It introduces a class of connectives, often combining units larger than the sentence, and discusses the frequent non-use of clause connectives in Chinese composite sentences. The second part contains case studies of composite sentences with unusual semantic properties, among them a hitherto unrecognized pattern with no English counterpart: adverbial clauses expressing necessity. The text should interest students of Chinese linguistics and general linguists concerned with sentence complexity.