Hongyin Tao

Research Areas & Sample Projects

• Mandarin discourse and grammar
• • Multimodal analysis of Mandarin conversational interaction;
  • Conversational actions and projects: extreme case formulations/categorical statements; generic expressions; lists; remembering/forgetting; membership categorization;
  • An Emergent Grammar approach to linguistic structure in Chinese;
  • Lexical semantics as an emerging phenomenon;
  • Epistemic stances in Chinese discourse (project supported by the UCLA Academic Senate);
  • Fixed expressions in Chinese and beyond;
• Applied Linguistics: Language learning and teaching
• • Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER), a US Department of Education sponsored project for advanced language teaching. Recent sub-projects:
    • a) Spoken teaching materials based on natural conversation;
    • b) Video recordings of natural interaction for Chinese listening comprehension;
    • c) Academic and professional Chinese: a corpus and teaching materials.
  • Heritage language corpora and research. (See an edited volume in the Heritage Language Journal.)
  • K-12 Chinese language education in conjunction with the Los Angeles Unified School District. (The New York Times has some recent discussions on K-12 Chinese language education.)
  • UCLA Chinese Language Teaching Video Clips project: showcasing ways to use authentic video materials in language teaching.
  • Integrating linguistic research and language teaching and learning.
• Corpus linguistics & Computer Data Visualization
• • Co-Director (with Charles Meyer & John Du Bois) of the US component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) project;
  • The UCLA Corpus of Written Chinese and its visualization tools.
  • Corpus of Written Academic and Professional Chinese (hosted at Peking University's CCL collections);
  • Corpus of Spoken Academic Chinese and its visualization tools;
  • A Heritage Chinese Learner Corpus (joint work with Tao Ming and Jie Zhang);
  • The CallFriend Mandarin telephone conversation corpora (mainland China and Taiwan varieties).
  • Visualization with Tableau and Voyant Tools: Sample Chinese Word Cloud and UCLA Corpus visualization.
• English discourse and grammar
• • (With Charles Meyer) gapping in English discourse;
  • (With Michael McCarthy) non-restrictive relatve clauses in spoken American and British English;
  • 'Absolutely' and the impact of frequency on meaning and structure (Journal of English Linguistics 35.1, 2007);
  • (With Richard Z. Xiao) a corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English;
  • Formulaic expressions in English.
• Digital humanities
• • Discourse analysis software tools: A Corpus Worker's Toolkit (ACWT);
  • The Laozi (Dao De Jing) Web Project (supported by the Hong Kong University Grant Committee (UGC) and the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities);