Foreign Language Books : Chinese

This book is a full reference grammar of Qiang, one of the minority languages of southwest China, spoken by about 70,000 Qiang and Tibetan people in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northern Sichuan Province. It belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman (one of the two major branches of Sino-Tibetan). The dialect presented in the book is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County. This book, the first book-length description of the Qiang language in English, is the result of many years of work on the language, and is as typologically comprehensive as possible. It includes not only the reference grammar, but also an ethnological overview, several fully analyzed texts (mostly traditional stories), and an annotated glossary. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent marking morphology. The phonology of Qiang is quite complex, with 39 consonants at seven points of articulation, plus complex consonant clusters, both in initial and final position, as well as vowel harmony, vowel length distinctions, and a set of retroflexed vowels. The grammar also more...

Price: $207.20

Both as an intermediary to Western culture and as a cultural force in itself, Japan had a significant impact on the development of modern Chinese literature. However, for the most part, the links of this Sino-Japanese literary relationship has only just begun to receive scholarly attention, making this book's exploration of Japan's role in shaping Chinese cultural modernity an important addition to the literature. By comparing and contrasting what appear to be similar narrative modes between the shishosetsu and work coming out of the Creation Society, Keaveney explores how Chinese writers both appropriated and reconceptualized this Japanese approach. By letting their work retain both self-referentiality and articulations of social concerns, the Chinese authors were able to make the form far more political than it ever was in the hands of Japanese writers. more...

Price: $59.95