Vertical grammar: Linguistic linearity in the earliest Chinese grammatical descriptions

The earliest Chinese texts belonging to the realm of linguistics appeared as early as 3rd century B.C.E.; notwithstanding the fact that, in the following centuries, a very solid tradition of linguistic studies was carried out, it is possible to hold that yet it lacked quite a firm theoretical framework, comparable, for instance, to European or Indian linguistics. Its main branches were philology, phonology, rhetoric, and the study of the characters; Chinese linguists did not develop any study of grammar, that is, of the structural rules of the Chinese language, let alone a theoretical one. It was only after the contact with European and American linguistics, in 19th century, that some grammatical works, employing Western categories, appeared in China. On this ground it is possible to state that no theoretical analysis of the linear nature of language, as proposed by Saussure, was ever expounded, at least before the translation of Saussure's Course in China and presumably still long after it. Such a lack is even more remarkable, as in Chinese, an isolating language, word order and the position of phrases are crucial to the understanding of a sentence. The aim of my contribution is to maintain that, nonetheless, it is still possible to detect a notion of the linear nature of the Chinese language both in traditional and in modern grammatical works. By means of the analysis of the terminology employed in traditional linguistic texts, mainly dealing with rhetoric or philology, it turns out that Chinese linguists did have a notion of the sentence as orderly disposed on the space. The peculiarity of their concept was that order was vertical rather than horizontal: terms do not refer to the dicotomy 'left-right' but rather on 'upper-lower'. The idea of the Chinese language as vertically disposed was still present in the earliest grammar texts of 19th century, as the terminology there employed testifies. It is only the terms for some newer notions, appeared later at the end of 19th and at the beginning of 20th century, that let some scholars formulate the hypothesis that Chinese linguists were finally conceiving a horizontal disposition of the linguistic act or even a multi-layered one.