The system of Chinese grammar has been established within the framework of Indo-European grammatical theory. Defining Chinese grammar within this framework has become a tradition in the study and teaching of Chinese grammar. However, strictly adhering to this tradition often leads to a sense of “cutting the foot to fit the shoe” or “being stretched too thin” in the teaching of Chinese grammar. Advocating for the concept of “macro-grammar”, which emphasizes “usage” as the foundation and gives equal importance to phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, can help broaden our perspective and enable a more comprehensive understanding of Chinese grammar. This, in turn, allows us to address problems encountered in Chinese language teaching more effectively and reasonably.

This paper reviews and critiques the development and evolution of Chinese sentence analysis theories over forty years. Since the early 1980s, Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) has comprehensively replaced Head Word Analysis and become the mainstream for analyzing Chinese sentences. However, ICA exhibits certain limitations, such as excessive segmentation and ignoring the integrity of structure. To address these issues, Lu Bingfu (1981, 1993) proposed Major Constituents Analysis (MCA), which optimizes ICA through finite segmentation and orbital layers. In recent years, Shen Jiaxuan (2019) has advocated for the dialogical nature and paratactic relations in Chinese grammar, a novel perspective that essentially treats sentences as flat structures. Building on an in-depth understanding of the principles underlying MCA and flat structure analysis, and integrating years of personal research, we further elaborate on interpreting flat structures through three aspects: first, the segmentation of SVO sentences; second, the relationship between dislocated sentences and regular sentences; and third, the full-match of prosodic structure and grammatical structures. This paper argues that MCA, grounded in semantic analysis, represents a deeper-level grammatical framework. By combining major constituent structure with pragmatic contexts and prosodic information in language use, flat structures emerge. Fundamentally, Major constituent Structure emphasizes semantics, while flat structure prioritizes pragmatics.

Whether with regard to the isolated pronunciation of the word ‘one’ 蜀 or its pronunciation in the construction of ‘蜀 + classifier’ in eastern Mǐn dialects, a regular phonetic correspondence is not necessarily formed between the dialects. This is because of a number of exceptional weakening phonological changes, such as shortening or lowering of tone, iambic stress structure, palatalization of initial consonants, deletion of medials, reduction of markedness of vowels, and deletion of nuclei.

This paper utilizes French diplomat Imbault-Huart’s Cours éclectique graduel et pratique de la langue chinoise parlée (1887–89) and proved that it reflects another internal variation of the Běijīng dialect of the 19th century. The Cours seems to reject certain features associated with the traditional Běijīng dialect. According to Joseph Edkins, the literati from Jiāngnán area who had resided in Běijīng for generations employed a language combined “the tones of Běijīng with the initials and the rhymes of Nánjīng.” This paper reveals that the Cours most likely reflects the language seen in the Edkins’ grammar.

This study investigates the diachronic usage and orthographic changes of the modal particle “則箇” (個・个) from the Song to the Qing dynasties, based on vernacular Chinese texts. Materials are organized by period and literary style, clarifying the particle’s distribution and usage patterns in each era. The analysis reveals a gradual decline in frequency, leading to its disappearance. This study also examines changes in written forms and possible causes. Through systematic analysis of historical data, the paper presents a comprehensive view of the particle’s development and contributes to understanding linguistic change in pre-modern Chinese.

This study adopts a discourse-cognitive perspective to investigate the licensing conditions of associative anaphora in Modern Chinese. It argues that the establishment of such reference is influenced by three key factors: the knowledge frames, the descriptive modifier of the antecedent, and the type of predication. Drawing on Discourse Model Theory, the interpretive process is shown to be dynamic, unfolding from general to specific and from abstract to concrete. Crucially, it is not solely based on stereotypical lexical relationships but is highly context-dependent, requiring integration of discourse-level information.

This paper examines the unique [yǒu + stative verb + dào] construction in Taiwan Mandarin and analyzes its syntactic and semantic properties. Based on collected linguistic data and previous studies, this construction is classified into two types: Type A, which denotes that the patient is influenced in some way and undergoes a change, and Type B, which emphasizes the property or state of an entity. Furthermore, this paper explores its correspondence with Taiwanese Southern Min, arguing that the “yǒu” in Type A and Type B reflects two functions of “ū” in Taiwanese Southern Min: indicating the existence of an event and emphasizing a property or state. This study contributes to clarifying the grammatical characteristics of this construction and deepening our understanding of its origin and development.

This study investigates the preverbal use of “numeral + cì” in Modern Chinese, which diverges from canonical verbal classifier constructions. When used adverbially, cì does not encode quantificational focus but conveys a subjectively large quantity, with a strong tendency to occur in realis contexts. These semantic and pragmatic features are examined in terms of information structure, the generic nature of cì, and an asymmetry in communicative plausibility: expressions of subjective largeness are more easily accepted than those of smallness, making the adverbial position particularly compatible with interpretations involving speaker-oriented quantity emphasis.

This study examines constructions in which duo ‘more,’ shao ‘less,’ zao ‘early,’ and wan ‘late’ function adverbially and are followed by a verb and a numeral expression. It argues that the structure should be segmented as [A][VNum], instead of [AV][Num], based on scope and constituency tests. There is a strong tendency for numeral expressions to co-occur with the aspect marker le, and their function is analyzed from the perspective of boundedness—specifically, as a match between action and property. Finally, this study discusses cases in which the verb does not take the aspectual suffix le.