Shengli Feng Livres

The combat techniques of Tai Ji, Ba Gua, and Xing Yi were forbidden during China's Cultural Revolution, but the teachings of grandmaster Wang Pei Shing have survived. This comprehensive guide, written by one of his students, selects core movements from each practice and gives the student powerful tools to recognize the unique strategies and skills, and to develop a deeper understanding, of each style. It contains complete instructions for a 16-posture form to gain mastery of combat techniques. The book helps practitioners achieve a new level of practice, where deeply ingrained skills are brought forth in a more fluid, intuitive, and fast-paced fashion.

The book explores the application of prosodic morphology to Mandarin Chinese, offering insights into the structural organization of its words. By examining the theoretical model, Feng clarifies the principles behind word formation in the language, enhancing the understanding of its unique morphological characteristics.

In linguistics, it has been commonly assumed that syntax can exert influence on prosody, but the opposite direction, prosody influences syntax, is much less widely recognized. The present manuscript argues for a bidirectional interaction between prosody and Syntax governs prosody and prosody also constrains syntax, based on data from Chinese. For example, a classical problem in Chinese syntax is only one constituent is, in general, allowed after the main verb. However, if the object is a destressed element (a pronoun, for example), two constituents can legitimately occur after the verb. This pattern is explained by proposing a prosodic feature assignment on elementary trees in the Tree Adjoining Grammar notation. The manuscript is the first work that a system of prosodically constrained syntax is proposed in the literature, and it will create a sub-field of linguistics in the study of human languages.