On the Problems of Basic Unit of the Chinese Language

Abstract

This article discusses various approaches used in describing the Chinese language basic unit of grammar. The problems faced by Chinese linguists along this path are due to the typological features of the Chinese language, where the word plays a peripheral role in the system, therefore units of all levels, from morpheme to sentence, were promoted to the status of the basic unit of the language in different periods. One by one we introduce problems, faced by Chinese linguists, as they are described in the most important works, along with the solutions they offer depending on the dominant theory of the linguistic history period. It shows how the views of scientists on the structure of the Chinese language and the choice of the basic (structural) unit of its grammar has been shifting due to the expansion of scientific knowledge about the typological features of languages. In contrast to previous periods, when a single view of the basic unit of grammar prevailed in linguistic research, today theories tend to pluralize. At the present stage, the search for ways to represent the Chinese language without the templates, developed with Western languages and European linguistics, has led to the emergence of several original concepts, hardly known to the Russian-speaking audience. The unsolved problem of defining a word, the difficulty of distinguishing units at the syntactic level in Chinese led to proposition of а sentence (clause), a syntagma (word group) and a character (taken on a new meaning) as the basic unit of the language structure. The validity of these approaches usually domestically described as those with Chinese characteristics requires discussion in the scientific community outside China and should be proofed or at least validated on a wide range of language concepts.