Considering a number of factors such as cross-linguistic influences, saliency and detectability of language cues, language complexity, and the interfaces involved, this book provides a systematic and coherent study of non-native grammars of Chinese. It covers a broad range of language aspects of Chinese as a non-native language, such as syntax, semantics, discourse, and pragmatics, as well as language phenomena specific to Chinese, such as classifiers, sentence final particles, the topic structure, and the ba-construction. It explores the effect on the linguistic structure of Chinese, when it is spoken as a second language by first-language speakers of English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Spanish, Swedish, Russian and Palestinian Arabic, enabling the reader to understand the learners' mental representations of the underlying systems of the target language. New points of departure are also recommended for further research, making it essential reading for both Chinese language teaching practitioners, and academic researchers of non-native language acquisition.

‘This book is a must-read for scholars at any stage of their careers engaged in L2 or L3 acquisition research, especially those focused on Mandarin. It provides a thorough overview, critical insights and-importantly-up-to-date discussions that highlight Mandarin’s relevance to key theoretical debates in third language acquisition.’

Eloi Puig-Mayenco - Senior Lecturer in Psycholinguistics, King’s College London

‘This book is an excellent resource for scholars and students working on L2 Chinese and on formal approaches to second language acquisition and multilingualism more generally.’

Tania Ionin - Professor of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign