Title: Comprehensive
Product review: Comprehensive is certainly one word that comes to mind when reading this book. Most of Chen's research spans around the Northern dialects such as Wu as they exhibit some of the most interesting and complex sandhi phenomena of all the Chinese dialects. (e.g., dialects such as Shanghainese show evidence of an aborted evolution to transforming into a stress-based language.) On the flip side, Southern dialects such as Cantonese are virtually untouched by sandhi and have rich tone inventories inside and across word boundaries and have preserved much of the flavor of Middle Chinese.All in all an excellent read for serious scholars of Chinese languages. Be warned that this is by no means an introductory text, however those with a background in linguistics or computer science would be able to jump right into it.
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