Recent Publications on Chinese Language and Linguistics

Under the direct influence of international linguistics research trends, led notably by two major publishing houses, the Oxford University Press and Wiley-Blackwell, along with Routledge, Cambridge University Press, John Benjamins, De Gruyter and Spinger, Chinese linguistics has seen four major accomplishments in less than three years. Namely, this includes The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Blackwell, 2014, henceforth 'Blackwell Handbook'), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Oxford, 2015, henceforth 'Oxford Handbook'), The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (Routledge, 2016, henceforth 'Routledge Encyclopedia') and The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (Brill, 2016, henceforth 'Brill Encyclopedia.'). The publication of these four books and in particular their contributors should be congratulated for providing such an unprecedentedly wide scope of up-to-date accounts of the Chinese language and linguistics. These books also include a variety of perspectives, such as generative, descriptive, experimental, historical, comparative, cognitive, evolutionary, functional, sociocultural and teaching, for readers from academics to general readers. Almost every entry comes with a comprehensible introduction to the topic and a detailed bibliography.

It is evident that the chapter/entry numbers, contributors and length of these four books increased significantly: 24, 55, 41, 500+ by chapter/entry number; 30, 66, 66, 364 by contributor number; 680, 792, 828, 3,454 by book page, respectively. However, the quality of the books did not improve proportionally. The Blackwell Handbook excels as a first-mover and in its in depth discussion of syntax, but is not able to present a complete picture of Chinese linguistics because half of its chapters are on syntax and morphology. The Oxford Handbook keeps a balanced account of many more topics and aspects of research fields. The Routledge Encyclopedia extends its content to beyond linguistics, but its presentation of a few topics is either too simple or too luxurious. The Brill Encyclopedia is so far the largest encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics published in any language. The book's scope is hard, if not impossible, to surpass. However, quality of its entries varies. A thorough comparison of the quality of these four books is infeasible since it is hard to find a topic shared by all books, but the following topics are worth exploring: tones, prosody, idioms, prominence (including negation, focus) of a part of a sentence, verbs in a broader sense, southern dialects, grammaticalization, Guangyun (广韵), language contacts and Chinese cognitive linguistics.

Four similar books in less than three years may seem crowded even given the fact that the compilation of a multi-volume book on Chinese language and philology (Yuyan Wenzi Juan 语言文字卷) in the third edition of the Encyclopedia of China (Zhongguo Dabaike Quanshu中国大百科全书) and the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (See the website of Yen-Hwei Lin "Selected Publication" https://liny.msu.domains/research/, accessed April 13, 2018) is in full swing.

Maybe what we need most in the next one or two decades is not an even larger mammoth, but annual book series such as 'advances in Chinese language and linguistics,' which is similar in format to Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology published by the Oxford University Press since 2011. Each volume in that series includes usually six chapters, each of which can get a length of approximately fifty pages to give a state-of-¬the-art review of real progress on a certain topic such as 'Metaphor, Cognition, Culture' in Volume 7 (2018). If the publication of comprehensive research on Chinese language and linguistics goes in this way, we will see the next peak of encyclopedias in around 2030.