The History of Chinese Grammars in Chinese and Western Scholarly Traditions

Abstract

This article evaluates the scientific contribution of Western scholars and missionaries in the compilation of a large number of descriptive grammars for Chinese languages which appeared during the period from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. This is all the more interesting, given that the native tradition of grammatical studies only began to develop at a very late period in China’s history, the first real grammar being published in 1898. This was the Mă shì wén tōng 馬氏文通 by Ma Jianzhong, a scholar who had gained a Western education while studying in Paris and was therefore broadly familiar with some of the main European intellectual traditions in linguistics, as well as the Chinese ones, concerned above all with rhetoric and philology.After a presentation of the main grammars of Chinese languages produced by Europeans during this period, the aptness of their theoretical frameworks is tested by analysing the treatment of the numeral classifier, a part of speech not found in European languages. The reasons for the prolonged lack of any theoretical interest in grammar, revealed in the native Chinese linguistic tradition, is speculated upon in an epilogue.