Grammar
See also: Classical Chinese grammarLittle is known of the grammar of the language of the Oracular and pre-Classical periods, as the texts are often of a ritual or formulaic nature, and much of their vocabulary has not been deciphered. In contrast, the rich literature of the Warring States period has been extensively analysed. Having no inflection, Old Chinese was heavily reliant on word order, grammatical particles and inherent word classes.
Read more about this topic: Old Chinese
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“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)