Chinese Grammar
The grammar of Standard Chinese shares many features with other varieties of Chinese. The language almost entirely lacks inflection, so that words typically have only one grammatical form. Functions such as number in nouns or tense of verbs are expressed through word order or particles. The basic word order is subject–verb–object, and most modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs precede the words they modify. Chinese adjectives and prepositions are types of verb. As in many southeast Asian languages, classifiers are required when using numerals or demonstratives with nouns.
Read more about Chinese Grammar: Topic Prominence, Aspects, Mood, Serial Verb Constructions, Classifiers, Parts of Speech
Famous quotes containing the words chinese and/or grammar:
“I find it more credible, since it is anterior information, that one man should know heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men should know the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)