Recently I’ve been getting lot of e-mail from former students (at Ohio State and Stanford, both undergraduates and graduate students, from all periods of my roughly 50-year teaching career), mostly just saying hello and asking how I’m doing. They’re also mostly people who don’t read this blog or follow me on Facebook, so they really don’t know how I’m doing, and require a thoughtful response, one by one — and then I’ll want to hear how they’ve been doing, and the exchange takes a lot of time, so I’m perpetually way behind on maintaining these relationships. Which is where I am right now, somewhat desperate.
Now I take the coward’s way out, going first with the easy thing, responding to e-mail from a former student — Zheng-sheng Zhang, 1988 Ohio State PhD (Tone and tone sandhi in Chinese, for which I was the Doktorvater) — who does in fact follow this blog and was writing mostly to announce his latest book:
Zhang, Chinese Signs: An Introduction to China’s Linguistic Landscape (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2024)
My professional opinion (as an enthusiastic general linguist who’s not a Sinologist) is that this is a really cool book, using everyday materials for practical purposes (to help learners deal with the language in use) while, with a light hand, exploring big topics in language and culture as they’re manifested in Chinese. The publisher’s blurb for the book, with their note about Zhang:
Highlighting stylistic and rhetorical characteristics, this fully illustrated book explores the written form of Mandarin Chinese in a range of everyday settings. Taking examples from Chinese public writing across a variety of textual genres, such as signs, banners and advertisements, it prepares students for navigating ‘real world’ Chinese, not only in terms of its linguistic and stylistic characteristics, but also its social and cultural context. Drawing over 500 pictorial examples from the linguistic landscape, it explores the signs from a variety of perspectives, for example by highlighting elements of classical Chinese that are still used in the modern language, showing the most popular rhetorical patterns used in Chinese, and presenting the interactions between both Standard Mandarin and dialect, and Chinese and other languages. Detailed annotations are provided for all signs, in both Chinese and English, to accommodate readers of all proficiency levels in Chinese.
About the author: Zheng-sheng Zhang is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Asian / Middle Eastern Languages, San Diego State University. His publications include Dimensions of Variation in Written Chinese (2017) and Introduction to Chinese Natural Language Processing (co-authored, 2009).
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