Introduction
Hello. I got my Ph.D. in linguistics at UC Berkeley (May 2012). I did my undergraduate work (in linguistics as well) at Stanford and also have studied at San Francisco State University and at National Taiwan University (台大).
My dissertation work was on Ersu/Tosu/Lizu (Lizu is also known as Lyuzu, Lǚsū, or Gura), a group of Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in southwestern Sichuan, and I have done fieldwork on the Mianning dialect of Lizu. I also worked at The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Project (STEDT for short).
Interests
- phonetics and phonology
- historical linguistics
- Sino-Tibetan reconstruction
- Chinese dialects, especially Cantonese (粵) dialects, Toisan 台山/Szeyap 四邑 (check out a list of Szeyap references compiled by Aaron Lee and me)
- Tibeto-Burman languages
- tone and intonation
- sound change
Publications and Papers
Paper from ICSTLL52 (Sydney)
- Proto-Ersuic and Doshu (2019) - paper presented at the 52nd ICSTLL in Sydney, revising my reconstruction of Proto-Ersuic to take into account newly available data from Doshu (aka Tosu/Duoxu/多续语)
- also the slides from my presentation (7.5 MB)
Dissertation
- Proto-Ersuic (2012) - my dissertation, a reconstruction of the ancestor of Ersu/Tosu/Lizu. Includes lots of cool sound changes and interesting features of these languages.
Some unpublished papers and stuff...
- The Underlying Representation of Cantonese Vowels (2000) - my undergraduate honors thesis, about multiple complementation in the vowel system of Cantonese and how to come up with the "right" phonemic solution!
- The Phonology of Yánchéng (2005) - a description of 鹽城話, a dialect of Eastern Mandarin
- Relative clauses and nominal modifiers in Cantonese (2006) - Cantonese has at least two ways to make relative clauses! This paper gives an overview of the phenomena and explores different analyses.
- Comparative Phonology of Picurís and Taos (2006) - a micro-comparison of two Northern Tiwa languages
- More Picuris materials: A Picurís Lexicon and Picurís Children's Stories With Interlinear Glosses. These are in rough draft form, but perhaps they will be useful to others out there. (2006)
- Lizu and Proto-Tibeto-Burman (2009) - working out the reflexes of PTB rhymes and initials in three dialects of Lizu and one of Ersu. Superseded by Chapter 8 of my dissertation, but included here for reference.
- "Proto-Ersuic, Qiangic, and PTB": my slides/handout from ICSTLL45 (2012)
Other
Here is a Nuosu Input Method for Mac OS X for typing in the Nuosu syllabary (see the wikipedia article on "Yi script").
last modified 2020.04.18