PROGRESS IN THE RESEARCH OF MODERN CHINESE SYNTAX

Having attended these conferences, I have to say that generally a lot of
progress seems to have been made in the past ten years or so in the domain of
the research into modern Chinese syntax. The programmes of these conferences
also revealed syntacticians working in the field of Chinese are facing, and
taking up, a new challenge in the form of the Chinese dialects. In the past,
most research on Chinese has concentrated on the standard variety. This
concentration of attention and investigation has been very fruitful because in
a relatively short period of time, these combined efforts have yielded
considerable insight into this one variety. Now, however, it seems to be time
to disperse and, using the knowledge of the standard variety, we should direct
our descriptive and theoretical attention towards the syntax of the Chinese
dialects. Careful comparative work has been very fruitful in the domain of the
Germanic and Romance language families, as well as elsewhere, and it may be
expected that this will turn out to be the case in the Chinese language
family. A. Yue-Hashimoto has made an important first step with the publication
in Paris last year of her guide to Chinese dialect syntax fieldwork. The CRLAO
has also been doing a lot of research on the different dialects, gathering
data and working them out systematically. Judging from the programmes of the
conferences mentioned above, more researchers are realizing the importance of
the Chinese dialects so I expect this to develop into a very exciting field of
activity in the immediate future.