The Nature of Chinese Grammar: Perspectives from Sign Language*

Chinese grammar exhibits typological features shared by sign languages and young creole languages. Furthermore, like sign languages, Chinese, as much as possible, contextualizes the knowledge of the world, thereby simplifying the syntactic structure and allowing relatively free word order and argument selection. The structural similarities between sign languages and young creole languages can be accounted for by the fact that both types of languages are young languages with an acquisition ambience of mixed language inputs in contact situations. Yet, while young creoles lack inflectional morphology, sign languages have enriched, simultaneous inflectional morphology due to the visual-gestural modality effects. If inflectional morphology in spoken language is a property of old languages, as proposed by Aronoff, Meir, and Sandler (2005), then why didn't Chinese, during the course of its long history, develop a rich morphology, as with European lan-guages? A reasonable explanation is that Chinese has opted to utilize functional mappings rather than inflections for making distinctions among different word classes. This strategy is in line with Nisbett’s (2003) contention that Chinese cog-nition focuses on relations rather than on attributes of individuals. Furthermore, given the the cirucmstances whereby both sign language and Chinese optimize world knowledge to simplify syntactic structures, the “Simpler Syntax ” hypothesis recently advanced by Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) can be made even simpler. 0