This chapter focuses on foundational grammatical concepts, first discussing the basic difference between content and function lexical categories before moving on to morphological language type, grammaticalization, and inflectional marking. The information investigated in this and the next four chapters is so interconnected that the material, as it is presented, is a bit like a spiral. One section will introduce you to a specific concept with a handful of other concepts and then a later section will return to that initial concept while discussing other related concepts. This material will continue to be presented using a spiraling method, linking the major grammatical concepts of this and the next four chapters. The grammatical decisions you will make at the end of this chapter focus on how much grammatical information is packaged within a single word unit and how constituents beyond the subject, object, and verb are typically ordered in clauses.

This chapter introduces parts of speech (PoS) and their functions in Chinese. The PoS that are introduced include the major categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The unique category of classifiers (measure words) and the minor categories of numbers, pronouns, modal verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and particles are also discussed.