mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== #next previous up next next up previous contents Next: What does a Chinese Up: Introduction to the Chinese Previous: Chinese Idioms Contents Introduction to Elementary Chinese Grammar * Mandarin Chinese Outpost--Elementary Chinese Grammar Chinese grammar is very different from Czech grammar. Czech is a highly inflectional language; whereas Chinese is regarded as an isolating language by Hutchins & Somers (1992) due to its lack of inflectional morphology. As the syntactic role of each word within a Czech sentence is often marked, the word order of a Czech sentence plays a relatively less significant role in characterizing the syntactic function of each word than that in an English or Chinese sentence. Thus, Czech sentences can have a relatively free word order; whereas words within a Chinese sentence have a rigid order. Swapping the order of words within a Chinese sentence can often make the resulting sentence ungrammatical or conveying inappropriate information. _________________________________________________________________ Subsections * What does a Chinese sentence look like? * Punctuation Marks * Words * Singular versus Plural * Quantifiers * A marker for Chinese modifiers * Tenses & Aspects * Adverb * Prepositons * Modal Particles, Interjections & Onomatopes + Modal particles + Interjections + Onomatopes * Some Ambiguous Chinese words _________________________________________________________________ Shun Ha Sylvia Konecna Wong 2001-02-19