This book is the first collection of studies on an important yet under-investigated linguistic phenomenon, the processing and production of head-final syntactic structures. Until now, the remarkable progress made in the field of human sentence processing had been achieved largely by investigating head-initial languages such as English. The goal of the present volume is to deepen our understanding by examining head-final languages and offering a comparison of those results to findings from head-initial languages. This book brings together cross-linguistic investigations of languages with prominent head-final structures such as Basque, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. It will inform readers of linguistics with both theoretical and experimental backgrounds, as it provides accounts of previous studies, offers experimentally-based theoretical discussions, and includes experimental stimuli in the original languages.

This book aims to dispel the myth that Chinese "doesn't have words" but instead "has characters." Jerome Packard challenges the common belief that Chinese has no morphology, demonstrating how analysis of Chinese word formation enhances our understanding of word universals in natural language. His book describes the intimate relationship between words and their components and offers new insights into their evolution. Models are offered for how Chinese words are stored in the mental lexicon and processed in natural speech.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

A Social View on the Chinese Language is intended to be a general linguistic introduction to the Chinese language for the general reader and can be used in beginning-level Chinese linguistics courses. It is different from other Chinese linguistics surveys because, in addition to the usual areas of interest (such as the Chinese dialects, the history of the language, the characters and the grammar), it offers a view into linguistic phenomena that are also related to human behavior and society, such as how Chinese children and US college students learn Chinese, how the brain processes Chinese, the genetic origins of Chinese, language disorders and language loss in Chinese, differences in Chinese language use in different social groups, studies of Chinese reading and psycholinguistic aspects of Chinese language use.

This book is the first collection of studies on an important yet under-investigated linguistic phenomenon, the processing and production of head-final syntactic structures. Until now, the remarkable progress made in the field of human sentence processing had been achieved largely by investigating head-initial languages such as English. The goal of the present volume is to deepen our understanding by examining head-final languages and offering a comparison of those results to findings from head-initial languages. This book brings together cross-linguistic investigations of languages with prominent head-final structures such as Basque, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. It will inform readers of linguistics with both theoretical and experimental backgrounds, as it provides accounts of previous studies, offers experimentally-based theoretical discussions, and includes experimental stimuli in the original languages.

This ground breaking study dispels the common belief that Chinese 'doesn't have words' but instead 'has characters'. Jerome Packard's book provides a comprehensive discussion of the linguistic and cognitive nature of Chinese words. It shows that Chinese, far from being 'morphologically impoverished', has a different morphological system because it selects different 'settings' on parameters shared by all languages. The analysis of Chinese word formation therefore enhances our understanding of word universals. Packard describes the intimate relationship between words and their components, including how the identities of Chinese morphemes are word-driven, and offers new insights into the evolution of morphemes based on Chinese data. Models are offered for how Chinese words are stored in the mental lexicon and processed in natural speech, showing that much of what native speakers know about words occurs innately in the form of a hard-wired, specifically linguistic 'program' in the brain.