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JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS, Vol. 18, No. 2 REVIEW

This inaugural volume of the monograph series of the Chinese Language Teachers Association is a welcomed addition to the study of Chinese linguistics. Its focus on functionalism reflects a field that is both re-evaluating its present accomplishments and exploring the direction of its future development. I. Summary of the Monograph The monograph contains ten articles originally presented at the Ohio Symposium on Chinese Linguistics in 1987, an introduction by James Tai, and a preface by Frank Hsueh. Woven together by their shared functional theme, the articles deal with the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of Mandarin Chinese. Among the ten articles, two are directed toward establishing a functional theory of grammar, six concentrate more on analyses of various Mandarin constructions, and two are devoted to motivating the functional approach. John H.T. Lu's 'Formalism, Functionalism and Chinese Syntax' motivates a functional approach by offering theoretical arguments and retracing the recent history of the field. It is a manifesto of the adequacy and desirability of functionalism. On the other hand, Chauncey C. Chu's 'The Interplay of Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics in Mandarin Chinese' presents results of functional studies by summarizing recent works by him and his students. The functional studies of-le,-zhe, and zero anaphora all involve the claimed three-tiered hierarchy (clause, topic-chain, and paragraph) of Chinese discourse, and crucially rely on simultaneously taking account of more than one module. It is well-known that functional approaches can be manifested through different perspectives. The ones represented in this monograph include pragmatic, structural, and cognitive perspectives. Yung-O Biq's paper is the only one adopting a purely pragmatic perspective. Her paper, arguing for the function of ye as marking similarity, is entitled 'Ye as Manifested on Three Discourse Planes: Polysemy or Abstraction?' The three planes considered are propositional, epistemic, and situational. It is claimed that the polysemy approach of deriving multiple uses of the adverb ye from the basic meaning accounts for data on all three planes satisfactorily. On the other hand, the abstraction approach, which allows contextual variants over the core meaning, does not explain why and how the diverse uses are connected to the core meaning. Taking a structural perspective to deal with ye, and following the Prague school functional contrast of topic/comment, theme/rheme is Feng-fu Tsao's 'Topics and the Lian… Dou/Ye Construction Revisited.' Tsao claims that the constituent marked by lian is always a topic. Following up on his own continuing studies of topic …