This book offers a comprehensive survey of the major parts of speech in Mandarin. Seeking to identify the sets of universal and language-specific categories, it compares the range of categories available in Mandarin and the Indo-European languages and establishes six universal categories nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions and three language-specific ones, namely classifiers, localizers and sentence-final particles. Incorporating insights from recent research findings and the diachronic development of the language, the book sheds new light on the factors that...