La linguistique chinoise: influences étrangères entre XIXe et XXe siècle

While in 17th and 18th century essays on the Chinese language, written by European missionaries, Chinese was described as radically diverse, diametrically opposed, and the nature of grammatical studies in traditional China was not a matter of debate, the cliché of the absence of grammar studies in China began to take shape and spread among sinologists and non-sinologists right from the beginning of the 19th century. Modern Chinese grammar studies were shaped not only by the most famed authors and their great works, but also by less celebrated scholars, both Westerners and Chinese, with their little-known works. This thematic issue of Histoire Épistémologie Langage is dedicated to shedding light on some of them, in order to collect more data about the peculiar process of the grammatization of Chinese.