The introduction of English grammar studies into China in the 19thcentury

Abstract

During the first half of the 19th century, Protestant missionaries based in China started teaching some English to the students attending their schools; in the second half of the century Chinese scholars opened their own language schools and wrote their grammarbooks of English.This contribution describes four of the grammarbooks for English that marked milestones in that period: Morrison’sA Grammar of the English Language(1823), Lobscheid’sChinese-English grammar(1864), Cáo Xiāng’sYīngzìrùmén(1874), and Wāng Fèngzǎo’sYīngwén jǔyú(1878). Its aim is to sketch the lines of the introduction of some of the key terms for grammar, within the theoretical framework of the phenomenon of grammatization of Chinese: the mutual influence from contemporary grammatical studies of Chinese and other languages will be highlighted.