The March 2028 issue of Chinese Studies will be a special issue entitled “Diachronic Studies of the Grammar of Chinese and Chinese Dialects,” guest-edited by Research Fellow Wu Rui-wen 吳瑞文 at the Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica. Papers may be submitted in either Chinese or English and should respectively be 30,000 characters or 10,000 words or less (including footnotes). Form and style should follow the “Guide for Submissions to Chinese Studies” and the “Chinese Studies Stylesheet.”

The use of language has long been regarded as the factor that distinguishes humans from other animals, as well as being a mental activity unique to human beings. As an object, language is incessantly evolving, with grammar being no exception. One advantage of researching the Chinese language is its unbroken record of written texts spanning three to four millennia. On the surface, both ancient and modern Chinese use Chinese characters as the medium of communication; but in terms of grammar, significant differences exist, exemplified by lexical turnover, grammatical shifts, the emergence and cessation of certain grammatical functions, and taxonomical evolutions. For modern Chinese, aside from Mandarin being the standardized form, other dialects have also retained traces of its ancient counterpart: “When rituals are lost, seek them in the wilderness.” The historical grammar of dialects thus serves as a window into the transformations of Chinese grammar. Diachronic studies of Chinese grammar should then employ methodologies that combine longitudinal analyses of historical texts with modern Chinese and its dialects, thereby deriving general principles of grammatical shifts. Such research directions not only further our understanding of the Chinese language itself, but position the field as a reference for related studies of other languages.

Based on the above, the “Diachronic Studies of the Grammar of Chinese and Chinese Dialects” special issue, with a focus on the “longitudinal developments from ancient to modern Chinese,” aims to provide a platform for scholars in related fields to showcase the broad and diverse dimensions of research in the history of Chinese grammar.

The deadline for submissions to this issue is February 28, 2027

Please send submissions to us by e-mail at chinesestudies@ncl.edu.tw