Introduction

Asian linguistics is not an enthusiastically explored area to date and the situation has to change. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book covers the more ‘popular’ Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the less well-known ones such as Tagalog, Miao, Naxi, and Saaroa, and those falling somewhere in the middle of the spectrum such as Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai. It embraces theoretical linguistics targeting primarily the syntactic aspect of Asian languages. The book offers a collection of papers on discourse and pragmatics of Asian languages. It investigate Asian linguistics in the areas of psycho-linguistics and sociolinguistics respectively. The book addresses issues in applied linguistics, to includes four articles in Asian L2 acquisition and a final paper on Chinese translation studies.