This talk introduces and discusses some grammatical features of Old Pekingese. The materials that were examined in this study are of two types: (i) eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammars compiled by Western sinologists and missionaries who resided in China; and (ii) indigenous documents in Chinese from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In order to avoid scattered and unsystematic remarks on particular lexical usages, only grammatical issues have been addressed, and in particular syntactic constructions involving prepositional phrases (PP), as well as adverbs. The results of this preliminary study are twofold. First, it is illusory to rely on Western grammars for a good knowledge of the Pekingese spoken at the time they were written. Indigenous documents (novels, textbooks, etc.), on the other hand, are much more useful. They do, however, reflect the Pekingese spoken by the Manchus who occupied the Inner City, which is mistakenly considered the purest Pekingese. The latter was and still is spoken in the outer city south of Beijing and not in the inner city.
PhD in Linguistics of Sorbonne University, XIAO Lin was an Assistant Professor at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) before starting a Postdoctoral Researcher position at the Institute of East Asian linguistics (CRLAO) belonging to both the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS, France) and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She has published the book "Le chinois et l'iconicité de la syntaxe. L'iconicité de la séquence temporelle : du texte à l'´Aktionsart´", in the Collection of the Society of Linguistics of Paris, Peeters, 2019 (320pp.). She was awarded in 2020 the "Jean-Charles Perrot" Prize of the Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres and the"Young Researcher Prize" of the Fondation des Treilles. She is now preparing her next book on New perspectives on Pekingese in synchrony and diachrony.