| 摘要、提要註: |
"A Social View on the Chinese Language' is intended to be a popular linguistic introduction to the Chinese language - a text meant to be a simplified overview of my field, Chinese language and linguistics, intended for a popular audience. The text is intended to be a general linguistic introduction to the Chinese language for the general reader or use in a beginning-level Chinese linguistics course. It is different from other Chinese linguistics surveys, because in addition to the usual areas of interest (such as the Chinese dialects, the history of the language, the characters and the grammar), it offers a view into linguistic phenomena that are also related to human behavior and society, such as how Chinese children and US college students learn Chinese, how the brain processes Chinese, the genetic origins of Chinese, language disorders and language loss in Chinese, differences in Chinese language use in different social groups, studies of Chinese reading and psycholinguistic aspects of Chinese language use"-- |