on the historical period as the case may be. Similarly, the introduction to the book provides an up-to-date description of Sinitic languages in terms of history and geography, placing the goals of the
volume into perspective. A dialect map of China and a summary of each chapter is provided in this same introductory chapter to further facilitate use of the book. General readers, curious about Sinitic languages-or Chinese dialects-should find this collection equally accessible as specialists in the fields of Chinese linguistics; typology; historical and diachronic linguistics; grammaticalization; and empirical, descriptive linguistics. Topics covered include aspect,
evidentials, locatives, verb complementation, reduplication, modal verbs, markers of predication, affixation, prepositions, relative clauses, interrogatives, and stratification. Language data from most of
the ten main Chinese dialect groups are presented, the specific dialect studies being on Xiang, Cantonese Yue, and Taiwanese Southern Min. Earlier stages of Chinese examined include the Pre-Archaic Shang bone inscriptions, Archaic and Medieval Chinese, and the written genre of Classical Chinese.
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