Research Areas & Sample Projects
- Mandarin discourse and grammar
- o Multimodal analysis of Mandarin conversational interaction;
- o
Conversational actions and projects: extreme case
formulations/categorical statements; generic expressions; lists;
remembering/forgetting; membership categorization;
- o An Emergent Grammar approach to linguistic structure in Chinese;
- o Lexical semantics as an emerging phenomenon;
- o Epistemic stances in Chinese discourse (project supported by the UCLA Academic Senate);
- o Fixed expressions in Chinese and beyond;
- Applied Linguistics: Language learning and teaching
- o 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.
- o Heritage language corpora and research. (See an edited volume in the Heritage Language Journal.)
- o 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.)
- o UCLA Chinese Language Teaching Video Clips project: showcasing ways to use authentic video materials in language teaching.
- o Integrating linguistic research and language teaching and learning.
- Corpus linguistics & Computer Data Visualization
- o Co-Director (with Charles Meyer & John Du Bois) of the US component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) project;
- o The UCLA Corpus of Written Chinese and its visualization tools.
- o Corpus of Written Academic and Professional Chinese (hosted at Peking University's CCL collections);
- o Corpus of Spoken Academic Chinese and its visualization tools;
- o A Heritage Chinese Learner Corpus (joint work with Tao Ming and Jie Zhang);
- o The CallFriend Mandarin telephone conversation corpora (mainland China and Taiwan varieties).
- o Visualization with Tableau and Voyant Tools: Sample Chinese Word Cloud and UCLA Corpus visualization.
- English discourse and grammar
- o (With Charles Meyer) gapping in English discourse;
- o (With Michael McCarthy) non-restrictive relatve clauses in spoken American and British English;
- o 'Absolutely' and the impact of frequency on meaning and structure (Journal of English Linguistics 35.1, 2007);
- o (With Richard Z. Xiao) a corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English;
- o Formulaic expressions in English.
- Digital humanities
- o Discourse analysis software tools: A Corpus Worker's Toolkit (ACWT);
- o Corpus linguistics forum: http://www.corpus4u.org/;
- o The Laozi (Dao De Jing) Web Project (supported by the Hong Kong University Grant Committee (UGC) and the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities);
Sea of Bamboo, Anji, Zhejiang
Summer 2010