中国境内有着丰富的语言类型一般所说的汉语方言至少就有官话晋.DOC

Typology in China: the State of the Art (Pre-publication version) Hilary Chappell, LI Ming and Alain Peyraube( 1. Introduction China possesses rich linguistic resources which remain relatively untapped?: the 10 main Sinitic languages or dialect groups account for roughly 93% of the population (Mandarin, Jin, Xiang, Gan, Hui, Wu, Min, Kejia,Yue and Pinghua); the remaining 7% comprise the many different ‘minority’ languages in long term contact with Sinitic such as Tibeto-Burman, Mongolian, Hmong and Tai. In an almost unprecedented state of affairs, written records for Chinese extend without a break 3,000 years into the past, furnishing a rich documentation for any kind of historical study. These factors essentially create an ideal situation for carrying out typology from both synchronic and diachronic viewpoints. Nonetheless, the long-standing tradition in research on language and its relationship to literature in China has meant that very little attention has been directed towards other language families, let alone the dialects of Chinese. This emphasis on ancient versus modern studies, and standard Mandarin versus the other dialect groups in the Sinitic taxon, has led to the situation where the search for linguistic universals on the basis of crosslinguistic work has seen very little development. Even in the many dialect descriptions available, the largest parts of such grammars are devoted to phonology. Despite this, during the 1980s, interest in the work of Greenberg and linguistic typology was aroused in linguistic circles in China. It is edifying to briefly digress and compare the ways in which the two domains of diachronic linguistics and typology were differently linked in China as opposed to the west – that is, specifically Europe and the USA. While in the west, the new élan in typology set off a revival in the study of diachronic syntax, seen particularly in the renaissance of studies into grammaticalization, the opposite trend took place in China. After