This UTF8-encoded online bibliography contains English-language sources to assist students to get started thinking about their term paper project for Chinese 580. The Chinese Language: Description and Analysis, one of The Ohio State University's General Education Curriculum (GEC) third-level writing courses, under the auspices of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing. The bibliography is based on readings and references originally included as part of the online syllabus for Chinese 580 (Spring Quarter 1999).The references are divided into two major parts: Part A contains English-language references for Chinese 580 term papers, and Part B contains supplementary references such as Chinese grammars and general linguistics textbooks. More references have been added since in offering Chinese 580. Online resources are available there under Some Web Resources.
In addition to the above topics, I have a separate webpage on language and gender:
MC's Chinese Language and Gender On-Line Bibliography, which
includes some articles that are web-accessible.
Remember, also, that dictionaries of various kinds may also be helpful
as databases for your research (e.g., dictionaries on classifers, verbs, or adjectives
(yes -- on just one grammatical category!), reverse dictionaries (organized based on
the second morpheme in a compound or polymorphemic word containing a suffix), synonym dictionaries, antonym dictionaries,
dialect dictionaries and vocabulary compilations, loanword dictionaries, word frequency lists, etc., etc.!)
You should also check the section of the Chinese 580 course syllabus under Links and WWW Resources for
further sources.
[ MC's Home Page |
MC's ChinaLinks |
MC's Chinese 580 ]
A. ENGLISH-LANGUAGE REFERENCES FOR CHINESE 580 TERM PAPERS
Some references are given below to help you get started if you are working on one of the topics included here
thus far:
(Note: There are loan-word dictionaries that would also be useful for studying sources of loan words.)
(The book presents the "development of Modern Chinese from the late nineteenth century to the
1990s. It describes and analyzes in detail, from historical and sociolinguistic perspectives, the establishment and promotion of
Modern Spoken Chinese and Modern Written Chinese, and the reform of the Chinese script, and reveals the interaction of
linguistic, historical and social factors in the recent development of the language." [quote from publisher].
Bibliography includes many recent publications in Chinese and in English.)
(Primarily on language reform, and a short portion on gender-related issues.)
Special issue contains the following articles:
"Chinese language contact: An introduction" (Bjorn H. Jernudd),
"Problems and trends of standardization of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan" (David Chen-ching Li),
"Social climbing effects: the case marking system in Mandarin (Shuanfan Huang),
"The influence of Southern Min on the Mandarin of Taiwan" (Cornelius C. Kubler),
"Group interest in treating words borrowed into Mandarin and Taiwanese" (Robert L. Cheng),
"Power, solidarity, and luxury in Hong Kong: A sociolinguistic study" (Cheung, Yat-shing),
"Politeness in Chinese: Impersonal pronouns and personal greetings" (Beverly Hong),
"Language policies toward National Minorities in China" (Fu, Maoji), and
"Languages for the masses and Chinese languages in India" (D.P. Pattanayak)
Special issue contains the following articles:
"Introduction" (Bjorn H. Jernudd),
"Modernization of the Chinese language" (Zhou, Youguang),
"Standardization of Chinese in Taiwan" (John Kwock-Ping Tse),
"Terminological development and organization in China" (Liu, Yongquan),
"Science, technology, language, and information: Implications for language and language-in-education planning" (William Grabe and Robert B. Kaplan),
"The second Chinese character simplification scheme" (John S. Rohsenow),
"Contradictions in Chinese language reform" (Chin-chuan Cheng),
"Language planning and language use in Taiwan: Social identity, language accommodation, and language choice behavior" (M.E. van den Berg), and
"Review of John DeFrancis: The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" (Dayle Barnes)
(Articles, which reflect PRC in mid-1970's, include: "The common language and the language of everyday life", "Language reform", and
"The national minority".)
(This is a general introduction with six chapters covering:
1. Bilingualism and the world, 2. Bilingualism in the United States, 3. Bilingualism in society (including attitudes, language choice, and code-switching),
4. The bilingual child, 5. The bilingual person (including the bilingual brain, and psycholinguistics of bilingualism), and 6. Bilingual speech and language.)
(See also my Review of: John Gibbons (1987).)
(Note: This digest is not on bilingualism among the Chinese per se, but the subjects in the study include Chinese-American
students. As stated there, the digest "draws on a set of linguistic autobiographies written by
Asian-American college students in this author's classes at the University of California at
Berkeley over the last several years, and examines the pattern of language shift that takes place
in the young first- and second-generation student and why this shift takes place. It also looks at
the efforts families make to keep their heritage language strong (and why those efforts often do not
work) and at those rare people who have succeeded in becoming bilingual, and what happened to make it
possible.")
(Note: Library cataloguers may mistakenly transpose the author's given name and his surname, thereby
making "Wei" his surname.)
(Volume 2, edited by Jenny Cheshire and Peter Trudgill (1998), is
on Gender and Discourse.)
(Articles include: "Strategies in requesting" (Yanyin Zhang),
"Indirectness in Chinese requesting" (Yanyin Zhang),
"Refusing in Chinese" (Xing Chen, Lei Ye, and Yanyin Zhang),
"Performance of face-threatening acts in Chinese: complaining, giving bad news, and disagreeing" (Jinwen Steinberg Du), and
"Complimenting in Mandarin Chinese" (Lei Ye).)
(A study of differences (with implications for language learners) between Chinese and English conversations involving
invitations and how invitees accept or decline (i.e., 'refuse') these invitations.)
and
Zhou, Yimin and James J. Wang. 1995. Mutant Mandarin: A Guide to New Chinese Slang. San Francisco: China Books and Periodicals, Inc.
(This is a general book and does not deal with Chinese per se, but may be useful for learning about the topic in general.)
See also Berliner, Nancy Zeng. 1986. Chinese Folk Art: The Small Skills of Carving Insects.
Boston: Little, Brown and Co. (Includes info on symbols, homonyms, and auspicious words.)
Also check out other books and publications concerning Chinese symbols and art motifs.
Also see: Fong, Mary. 1996. "Communicating luck during the Chinese New Year."
In: Alberto Gonzalez, Marsha Houston, and Victoria Chen (eds.), Our Voices: Essays in Culture,
Ethnicity, and Communication. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Co.
(Includes short pieces on social, political and cultural changes affecting the selection of personal name; slangs and other new expressions, etc.)
(This book is not on Chinese naming per se. It looks at American society and on what we call ourselves and why it matters.)
Note: Selected Bibliography includes a section, "Books and Articles About Chinese Names," covering
both surnames and personal names. Publications listed in that section are in Chinese or English.
Also included is one in German:
Bauer, Wolfgang. 1959.
"Der Chinesische Personenname" [Chinese personal names]. Asiatische Forschungen 4:1-4097.
(Passages from the book include: "Chinese writing has evolved so little from its pictographic origins that contemporary Chinese are able to read
texts 3,500 years old." (p.43).
"... it is my contention that one of the 'inhibitory factors to the growth of modern science,' ironically enough,
was the Chinese ideographic script. It is my belief that the first scientific
literature, whether Oriental or Occidental, was destined to be written in an
alphabetic script because the alphabet creates the environmental conditions under which abstract theoretical
science flourishes." (p.54).)
"Language planning in China: Understanding and misunderstanding" (Zhou, Youguang), and
"Sets of phrases associated with 'eating', and the cultural information they carry" (Chi, Changhai).
"The cultural meaning of Chinese symbolic terms" (Chang, Jingyu),
"Name taboos and Chinese culture" (Ruan, Xianzong),
"Numerals and cultural psychology" (Wu, Xieyao), and
"Meaning beyond words: body language as seen in Chinese idioms" (Yang, Xiaoli).
"In and out of favour: attitudes to simplified Chinese characters" (Lavery, Mark),
"On translating Jin Yong's martial arts fiction" (Mok, Olivia),
"Why 'He Tongjian' changed her name" (Chen, Jianmin),
"Euphemism and social psychology" (Meng, Guo), and
"Trends in Chinese loan-words" (Cao, Congsun).
B. SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

[ A. General References |
B. Supplementary References ]
[ DEALL Home Page |
College of Humanities |
The Ohio State University ]
To cite this page:
Marjorie Chan's Online Bibliography for Chinese 580 - An Undergrad Chinese Linguistics Course
<http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/chan9/c580-bib.htm>
[Accessed <Date>]
Present and former students -- both grad and undergrad -- have helped with some of the references given here. My thanks
to Max Bohnenkamp, Thomas Chan, Scott McGinnis, Charlie Miracle, and Isao Shoji.
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Copyright (c) 1999-200x Marjorie K.M. Chan, Ohio State University. All rights reserved. |