I (we) wish to acknowledge this land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

Source: UTMLand Acknowledgement

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

. Observe, understand and describe major linguistic features (phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic and semantic) of any Sinitic variety;

. Know and tell the overall linguistic history of Sinitic languages, and apply this knowledge to practical tasks such as poetry reading & rhyme analysis, dialect learning, and basic

dialectological analysis, using available tools & resources.

. Perform basic hands-on documentation work on a Sinitic variety, and understand the importance of documentation and resource-building in the context of linguistic shift;

. Recognize the range of issues of research interest in Chinese linguistics and in other languages of this area.

Textbooks and Other Materials

Readings are a REQUIRED part of the coursework. We will be reading selections from a variety of sources, which may include:

[1] Norman, Jerry. Chinese. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

[2] Yip, Po-Ching and Don Rimmington. Chinese: A comprehensive grammar. Routledge, 2015.

[3]  Huang, Chu-Ren &  Dingxu Shi. A Reference  Grammar of Chinese. Cambridge  University Press. 2016.

[4] Sun, Chaofen. Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press. 2006.

[5] Li, Charles N., and Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: Afunctional reference grammar. Univ of California Press, 1989.

[6] Wang, William SY, and Chaofen Sun. The Oxford handbook of Chinese linguistics. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Readings will be available electronically, either through the University of Toronto Libraries, or on Quercus. You will not be required to purchase a specific textbook for this course.

Handouts, notes and other supplementary material will be provided as needed; these will be available on Quercus.

Note that our first class meeting will take place during a “tutorial” time: Thursday, September 7th. Lectures begin on Monday, September 11th.

Official information regarding campus closures is posted on theUTM Campus Statuspage.

Tri-campus information is available on theUofT Campus Statuswebpage.

Expectations

You  are  expected  to  come  to  class,   listen,  discuss,  and  ask  questions  whenever  you  don’t understand  something.  This  is   not  only   because  attendance  and   active   participation  are mandatory, and will be graded, for both lectures and tutorials (see EVALUATION COMPONENTS), but also because doing so will ensure that you get the fullest learning experience from the course.

Email Policy

Please make sure that you use only your @mail.utoronto.ca email address when you communicate with the instructor.

. Include the course code in the subject line as well as a clear and informative subject title. For instance:                   [ LIN375] asking for sick leave on

. Your emails will be answered within 2 business days.

. I have no particular preference for how you address me. Just use the form that you feel is the most comfortable and appropriate. In case you might wonder how to address people in an email in general: here is the rule of thumb I follow when I write my own emails: