All day
Through June 16, 2019
University of Chicago Center in Beijing
20th Floor, Culture Plaza
59A Zhong Guan Cun Street
Haidian District, Beijing
Jun. 14
The linguistic landscape in China is highly diverse. The living languages currently spoken in China are estimated to be around 300 (Ethnologue). The socio-economic changes in China in the last four decades have had profound implications for language variation and change. Rapid urbanization of rural areas and increased mobility of workers created many communities with intensive language contact. Traditional research on language diversity has focused more on grammar description and documentation of minority languages. But the complexity of the issues calls for theoretical and methodological innovations, and the traditional boundaries between different disciplines that are concerned with language variation and change must be renegotiated. To this end, the current workshop is an attempt to initiate exchange between researchers from a wide range of specializations, including language typology, language documentation, social-cultural studies of language policy and language attitude/identity, language evolution, and experimental/computational investigations about language diversity and change.
Sponsors
Linguistics Department, University of Chicago
University of Chicago Beijing Center
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University
Organizers
Ming Xiang
University of Chicago
Xiaolu Yang
Tsinghua University
Agenda
Day 1 (Fri, June 14)
9:00-9:20
Registration
Session 1
9:20-9:30
Introduction
Ming Xiang (The University of Chicago)
向明（芝加哥大学）
Xiaolu Yang (Tsinghua University)
杨小璐（清华大学）
9:30-10:15
Reconceptualizing Phonologization from An Individual Difference Perspective
Alan Yu (The University of Chicago)
10:15-11:00
How Languages Mix
Zhiming Bao (National University of Singapore)
包智明 （新加坡国立大学）
11:00-11:15
Break
Session 2
11:15-12:00
Contact Induced Changes in Kazakh in Urumchi
Aynur Abish (Minzu University of China) 阿依努·艾比西 (中央民族大学)
& Éva Á. Csató Johanson (Uppsala University, Sweden)
12:00-13:30
Lunch (All participants)
Session 3
13:30-14:15
A Cross-dialectal Comparison of Er-suffixation in Beijing Mandarin and Northeastern Mandarin: An Electromagnetic Articulography Study
Feng-fan Hsieh (National Tsing Hua University)
谢丰帆 (国立清华大学)
14:15-15:00
Variation in the Phonetics of Creaky Voice in Cantonese, Hmong, and Mandarin
Kristine Yu (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
15:00-15:15
Break
Session 4
15:15-16:00
Languge Contact or Cognate: — New Evidence of Tibeto-Altaic grammatical drift
Yeshes Vodgsal Atshogs (Nankai University)
意西微萨·阿错（南开大学）
16:00-16:45
Split Numeral Classifiers in the Chinese Variety Spoken by the Lalo Yi People
Hongyong Liu (University of Macau)
刘鸿勇（澳门大学）
Day 2 (Sat, June 15)
Session 5
9:00-9:45
Analyzing Head-initiality, Head-finality and Mixed Headedness: Domains, Language Types, and Patterns of Change
Andrew Simpson (University of Southern California)
9:45-10:30
Exploring the Outcome of Dialect Contact across Three Generations in Hohhot, China
Xuan Wang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
王璇（香港理工大学）
10:30-10:45
Break
Session 6
10:45-11:30
Symmetric and Asymmetric Coordinated Phrases in Gan-Qing Mandarin
Xuping Li (Zhejiang University)
李旭平（浙江大学）
11:30-12:15
Documenting the Language Abilities of 'left-behind' Ethnic Minority Children in China: Evidence from Kam-Mandarin Bilingual Children's Comprehension of Relative Clauses
Angel Chan & Wenchun Yang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
12:15-13:45
Lunch (All participants)
Session 7
13:45-14:30
Change and Inertia in Jiangnan: An Ultrasound Study of Fricative Vowels in Suzhou Chinese
Matt Faytak (University of California, Los Angeles)
14:30-15:15
The Distribution of post-focus-compression (PFC) in Tibeto-Burman Language Family: Is PFC A Genetic Linguistic Feature?
Bei Wang (Minzu University of China)
王蓓（中央民族大学）
15:15-15:30
Break
Session 8
15:30-16:15
Taste, Discourse and Middle-class Identity: Ethnography of the Chinese Saabists
Jie Dong (Tsinghua University)
董洁（清华大学）
16:15-17:00
Mode of Transmission and Language Change
William S-Y Wang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
王士元 (香港理工大学)
Day 3 (Sun, June 16)
Methods Tutorials
10:00-12:00
Signal Detection Theory for Syntactic Research
Matt Wagers (University of California, Santa Cruz)
12:00-13:30
Lunch (All participants)
13:30-15:30
Dimensionality Reduction for Linguists: A Practical Introduction
Matthew Faytak (University of California, Los Angeles)