This volume brings together recent work by a new generation of scholars on the formal semantic and pragmatic analysis of Chinese languages. Rather than presenting a comprehensive handbook, the volume offers a curated snapshot of an expanding field, showing how Chinese data can illuminate central questions in semantic theory.

The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including quantification, classifiers, telicity, incompleteness, temporal reference, modality, causation, degree semantics, scalar particles, wh-constructions, biased questions, clefts, and sentence-final particles. Across these domains, the volume demonstrates how formal tools can sharpen long-standing insights into Chinese grammar while opening new directions for cross-linguistic comparison. Combining theoretical modeling with diverse empirical evidence – including introspective judgments, corpus data, experimental findings, processing evidence, typological comparisons, and dialectal fieldwork – this book highlights the richness of Chinese as a testing ground for formal semantics.

It will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in formal semantics, pragmatics, Chinese linguistics, and cross-linguistic semantic theory.

Zhuosi Luo (罗卓思) is an assistant professor and researcher at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education and the National Research Centre for State Language Capacity at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her research focuses on semantics, syntax-semantics interface, as well as language and cognition, with a particular emphasis on the verbal and adjectival domains.

Haoze Li (李昊泽) is an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. His research focuses on semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces. By combining formal modeling with experimental methods, he addresses fundamental questions about the relationship between linguistic form and meaning in natural languages, with a particular focus on Sinitic languages.