New Perspectives on Chinese Formal Semantics

This volume brings together recent work by a new generation of scholars on the formal semantic and pragmatic analysis of Chinese languages. Rather than presenting a comprehensive handbook, the volume offers a curated snapshot of an expanding field, showing how Chinese data can illuminate central questions in semantic theory.

The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including quantification, classifiers, telicity, incompleteness, temporal reference, modality, causation, degree semantics, scalar particles, wh-constructions, biased questions, clefts, and sentence-final particles. Across these domains, the volume demonstrates how formal tools can sharpen long-standing insights into Chinese grammar while opening new directions for cross-linguistic comparison. Combining theoretical modeling with diverse empirical evidence – including introspective judgments, corpus data, experimental findings, processing evidence, typological comparisons, and dialectal fieldwork – this book highlights the richness of Chinese as a testing ground for formal semantics.

It will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in formal semantics, pragmatics, Chinese linguistics, and cross-linguistic semantic theory.