Architecture Of The Periphery In Chinese

Architecture of the Periphery in Chinese offers a comprehensive survey on the fine structure of the sentence peripheral domain in Mandarin Chinese from a cartographic perspective. Different functional projections hosting sentence-final particles, implicit operators and other informational components are hierarchically ordered according to the "Subjectivity Scale Constraint" functioning at syntax-discourse interface. Three questions will be essentially addressed: What is the order? How to determine such an order? Why such an order? This research not only gives a thorough examination of the peripheral elements in Chinese but also improves the general understanding of the ordering issue in the left-periphery crosslinguistically. This book is aimed at scholars interested in Chinese syntax or generative syntax.

Drawing on the author’s extensive fieldwork in the Dong areas in southwest China, this book presents a detailed picture of the Dong’s buildings and techniques, with new insights into the Dong’s cosmology and rituals of everyday life meshed with the architecture, and the symbolic meanings. It examines how the buildings and techniques of the Dong are ordered and influenced by the local culture and context. The timber bridges and drum towers are the Dong’s most prominent architectural monuments. Usually built elaborately with multiple roofs, these bridges and drum towers were designed and maintained by the local carpenters who also built the village suspended houses, in an oral tradition carried down from father to son or to apprentice. They were funded entirely by the local people, and the bridges tend to be built in places without great pressure of traffic or another bridge already existing close by. Why does such great expense go into the Dong’s buildings with elaboration? How were they built? And what do they mean to their users and builders? This book is an anthropological study on the Dong’s architecture and technique, and it aims to contribute a discourse on the interdisciplinary research area. It is suitable for graduate and postgraduate readers.

Discourse particles have often been treated as a phenomenon restricted to Germanic languages (Abraham 2020) and they still raise questions about their nature as an independent category. This book reveals that this phenomenon exists in other languages as well, and provides evidence for their nature as a separate category. The volume brings together a collection of nine papers that focus on three research topics: a) the diachronic development of discourse particles; b) their syntactic analysis; and c) the study of their semantic-pragmatics. Furthermore, it also discusses other issues less often dealt with in the literature but of great interest for linguistic theory, such as the acquisition of discourse particles by children or the analysis of elements not usually considered discourse particles but whose historical path or microvariation indicates otherwise. Additionally, the book offers a cross-linguistic perspective as it discusses various languages including Basque, Catalan, German, Italian, Laz, Mandarin Chinese, Old English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Displacement (of linguistic expressions) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural language. In the generative tradition, displacement is modelled in terms of transformation, or more precisely, movement, which establishes dependencies among syntactic constituents in a phrase structure. This book probes the question regarding to what extent movement theories can be unified. Specifically, I address issues surrounding the debate of the distinction between head movement and phrasal movement over the past few decades. The distinction presupposes that structural complexity of the moving element is correlated with its movement properties. The goal of this book is to show that this is an unwarranted assumption. Based on a number of case studies on verb displacement phenomena in Cantonese, I attempt a unified theory of movement by abandoning the head/phrase distinction in movement theories. These case studies converge on the conclusion that the phrase structure status of syntactic constituents bears a minimal role in theorizing displacement phenomena in natural language. This volume represents a minimalist pursuit of a unified theory of movement.

In view of its size, and vast land and sea boundaries that it shares with its neighbours, China has always regarded its peripheral policy as a crucial aspect of its national security. Such a mentality conforms to Chinese leaders' core belief that a stable external environment — in particular, its immediate region — remains the sine qua non for the continued and sustained rejuvenation of their nation.This book examines China's evolving strategies towards its surrounding peripheries. It is the first book to examine in detail President Xi Jinping's steering of China's peripheral diplomacy. It argues that China pursues an ambitious, omnidirectional regional diplomacy that emphasizes the entire periphery region, and not just specific peripheries. According to this book, Chinese regional policy cannot be properly and adequately understood without taking into account its full breadth, substance and scope. Featuring chapters that explore China's evolving policy in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Central Asia, and addressing new developments under Xi, this book fleshes out the intricacies of how China has been managing its peripheral relationships in Asia under new circumstances and new leadership.

This book explores China’s encounter with architecture and modernity in the tumultuous epoch before Communism – an encounter that was mediated not by a singular notion of modernism emanating from the west, but that was uniquely multifarious, deriving from a variety of sources both from the west and, importantly, from the east. The heterogeneous origins of modernity in China are what make its experience distinctive and its architectural encounters exceptional. These experiences are investigated through a re-evaluation of established knowledge of the subject within the wider landscape of modern art practices in China. The study draws on original archival and photographic material from different artistic genres and, architecturally, concentrates on China’s engagement with the west through the treaty ports and leased territories, the emergence of architecture as a profession in China, and Japan’s omnipresence, not least in Manchuria, which reached its apogee in the puppet state of Manchukuo. The study’s geographically, temporally, and architecturally inclusive approach framed by the concept of multiple modernities questions the application of conventional theories of modernity or post-colonialism to the Chinese situation. By challenging conventional modernist historiography that has marginalised the experiences of the west’s other for much of the last century, this book proposes different ways of grappling with and comprehending the distinction and complexity of China’s experiences and its encounter with architectural modernity.

Integrated Architecture is both a historical and contemporary work. The book was fi rst published in 1989 by Wu Liangyong, one of contemporary China’s most infl uential architects and theoreticians with the title A General Theory on Architecture. His eminence is also recognised by the international architectural community, above all, the group of architectural and urban planning theoreticians battling for a more decisive reform to the concepts, methodologies and practices presiding over the construction and requalifi cation of the contemporary metropolis. I fi rst met professor Wu Liangyong in 2005 at the Faculty of Architecture at the Tsinghua University of Beijing; his Faculty. Wu Liangyong founded the school in 1949 – at the age of 24 – together with Liang Sicheng, the father of modern Chinese architectural studies. From this moment – more than sixty-seven years ago – professor Liangyong has remained a central fi gure in Beijing’s academic community. He remains a constant source of inspiration, not only national, to education reforms and, above all, theoretical, methodological and operative research into architecture, the city and the territory. He is a rare fi gure, present throughout a lengthy historical period witness the world over to tumultuous upheavals in society and its cities. A period whose most dramatic and exalting manifestations were perhaps to be found in China; a period of war, of hope, of revolutions, of great leaps forward, of presumptions, horrors, errors, new leaps forward and incomprehensible economic growth; of irreversible social and cultural metamorphoses and – what interests us most as architects – of staggering urban growth and territorial transformations. The intellect of this minute and genteel fi gure held fast against the storms of history. The observation of events and the humanist and scientifi c principles of his personal culture continuously nourished an increasingly more effective refl ection on the meaning of architecture in today’s world. He also clearly saw its inextricable ties to the substance of the city and the impossibility to substitute the fi gure of the architect – scientist, humanist and artist. A few years after our meeting, having absorbed direct lessons from Wu’s work as an architect and theoretician, I proposed an Italian translation of an anthology of his writings. The material was to be drawn from his many books and essays on architecture and the city published continuously over the course of his incomparable career. Professor Wu Liangyong responded with a challenge: in lieu of this anthology of texts he proposed a full translation, in Italian and English, of a book published twenty years ago: 1989’s A General Theory on Architecture. Given the pace of cultural debate it would not have been out of place to imagine a book fi rmly sedimented in history. I understood, instead, that it was a milestone in the expression of Wu Liangyong’s ideas; a benchmark that, in all likelihood, served as the starting point for his later theories, even the most recent. Published in other fundamental essays, they range across the vast fi eld of human settlements, touching on all components of the man-made environment (Lucio Valerio Barbera).

In the early twentieth century, Chinese traditional architecture and the French-derived methods of the École des Beaux-Arts converged in the United States when Chinese students were given scholarships to train as architects at American universities whose design curricula were dominated by Beaux-Arts methods. Upon their return home in the 1920s and 1930s, these graduates began to practice architecture and create China’s first architectural schools, often transferring a version of what they had learned in the U.S. to Chinese situations. The resulting complex series of design-related transplantations had major implications for China between 1911 and 1949, as it simultaneously underwent cataclysmic social, economic, and political changes. After 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic, China experienced a radically different wave of influence from the Beaux-Arts through advisors from the Soviet Union who, first under Stalin and later Khrushchev, brought Beaux-Arts ideals in the guise of socialist progress. In the early twenty-first century, China is still feeling the effects of these events. Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts examines the coalescing of the two major architectural systems, placing significant shifts in architectural theory and practice in China within relevant, contemporary, cultural, and educational contexts. Fifteen major scholars from around the world analyze and synthesize these crucial events to shed light on the dramatic architectural and urban changes occurring in China today—many of which have global ramifications. This stimulating and generously illustrated work is divided into three sections, framed by an introduction and a postscript. The first focuses on the convergence of Chinese architecture and the École des Beaux-Arts, outlining the salient aspects of each and suggesting how and why the two "met" in the U.S. The second section centers on the question of how Chinese architects were influenced by the Beaux-Arts and how Chinese architecture was changed as a result. The third takes an even closer look at the Beaux-Arts influence, addressing how innovative practices, new schools of architecture, and buildings whose designs were linked to Beaux-Arts assumptions led to distinctive new paradigms that were rooted in a changing China. By virtue of its scope, scale, and scholarship, this volume promises to become a classic in the fields of Chinese and Western architectural history. Contributors: Tony Atkin, Peter J. Carroll, Yung Ho Chang,Jeffrey W. Cody, Kerry Sizheng Fan, Fu Chao-Ching, Gu Daqing, Seng Kuan,Delin Lai, Xing Ruan, Joseph Rykwert, Nancy S. Steinhardt, David VanZanten, Rudolf Wagner, Zhang Jie, Zhao Chen.