On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:

1. Gained an understanding of languages families, main linguistic typologies and the collocation of Chinese within the Romance languages family;
2. acquired an understanding of key concepts and terminology in the study of lexical categories and sentence structure in the world languages with a specific focus on Chinese;
3. developed ways for identifying those lexico-grammatical concepts and through corpus analysis in Chinese compared to English and other languages;
4. identified canonical mappings of concepts to Chinese linguistic structure in contemporary and earlier historical texts using linguistic theory constructs and their own linguistic experience;
5. identified and learned to describe key areas of interface between pragmatically motivated language use and language structure reflecting on texts from different historical periods and critically using their own bilingual and/or multilingual experience;
6. attained a level of lexico-grammatical ability equivalent to stage 5 in productive skills and higher stages in reading comprehension; and
7. developed their understanding of aspects of Chinese culture and contemporary Chinese society, research and critical-thinking skills and ability to use such skills to investigate Chinese cultural or social issues and express their opinions.

Grammatical structures and their functions in the following areas:
- Review of fundamental aspects of Chinese grammar: Phonology, minimal pairs, syllabification, allophony and phonological variation. Lexical categories and their behaviour;
- A brief sketch of the history of the language through some exemplary texts: including the emergence of vernacular Chinese in Tang and Song dynasties and its development through Ming and Qing dynasties to early 20th century compared to contemporary texts
- Searches of internet sites and other original sources for retrieval of relevant corpus data (diachronic and synchronic, written as well as, where Possible, spoken discourse) for processing, analysis and use. written and spoken materials may include short stories, Biographies, anthologies, children stories, articles from newspapers and magazines, plays or film excerpts, news and interviews
- research on Issues in Chinese language, culture and contemporary society using data from internet sites and/or other sources.
The cross-linguistic and typological component includes:
- An introduction to Basic concepts in identifying language families and typologies
- identifying and discussing major grammatical concepts, Categories and terms across languages at lexical level including verb, noun, person, number, tense and modality.
- identifying and discussing major grammatical concepts in reference to syntactic structure across languages with reference to canonical or default mappings.
- pragmatic and Semantic contribution to syntactic choices. e.g. politeness and probability, Topic and focus and their contribution to special Mapping on linguistic structure, such as question formation, passives, emphatic constructions.
- Developmental Issues and difficulties in The acquisition and/or translation of those Structures across languages.