Review of "上古汉语形态研究 Shànggŭ Hànyŭ Xíngtài Yánjiū"

Abstract

In recent years, a growing body of literature has questioned the received idea that Old Chinese, like modern Chinese dialects, lacked morphology. First, recent descriptions of languages belonging to subgroups such as Qiangic, Kiranti, or Kham1 have shown that lack of morphology and isolating typology is not widespread within the Sino-Tibetan family; quite on the contrary, it is limited to a few branches (such as Lolo-Burmese, Karen, Bai and Tujia) which have suffered severe phonological attribution and lost most traces of older morphology. Second, within the field of Chinese phonology itself, works such as Sagart (1999) and Pan (2000) have given a new impulse to the research on word families and morphological alternations, as well as a more rigorous framework of etymological studies. The book under review, though deeply influenced by Sagart and Pan’s works, is radically different from them both in its phonological reconstruction system and in his method of studying morphological alternations. Some of the new ideas proposed in this book have already been published in a series of articles in various Chinese linguistics journals (Jin 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005a,b,c), and it represents the culmination of more than a decade of work on Old Chinese phonology and Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics.