✎CV

Full CV View Baidu Bio (in Chinese) ^*

^* Baidu now does not allow me to update, so the info there is dated, but it links to my dad's bio.

✍ Hi, welcome to my site. I am a Chinese, by ethnic origin, teaching linguistics at SOAS, London. I was born in Beijing but grew up in the city of Shanghai (so I am a native speaker of Shanghainese), where I had my education up to M.A.¹ Then I worked at Fudan University teaching English and introduction to linguistics. I left Fudan in 1989 and studied for a Ph.D. in linguistics at University College, London, while also taking courses and receiving supervision at SOAS.² After that, and in fact before submitting the thesis, I found a job at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, so I left London to teach in Hong Kong for the next 22 years (long enough for me to learn Cantonese). In August, 2015, I was hired by SOAS Department of Linguistics. In between, I also spent four years at Surrey, British Columbia, on and off. Now I teach semantics, pragmatics, Chinese linguistics, and general linguistics. I mainly work on logical and formal treatments of meaning and use, with special relevance to the analysis of Chinese. At the same time, I try to be an all-rounder in Chinese linguistics, with focus on Chinese grammar, of Mandarin and other Chinese languages. There were times in the past when I was asked to teach Lingusitic Theories of Translation elsewhere. I am now teaching something similar at SOAS, applying theory to the English-Chinese translation practice. I am also interested in Chinese rhetoric and literature-related linguistic studies, even though I am no longer required to teach in these areas. Another module I have launched here at SOAS is Discourse and Pragmatics, which in fact are two separate areas, but I am trying to teach it as if they were two sides of the same coin! In addition to English, I speak Shanghainese, Mandarin, some Cantonese, and a dialect in Zhejiang called Haining dialect. I learnt French, Latin and German to varying degrees of familiarity. Overall, I like to consider myself as a semantic botanist³, a street-fighting logician⁴, and a worker on Chinese languages⁵ and general linguistics.

1. I give my thanks to all my teachers at Fudan University, including several British communists who taught there as "foreign experts".

2. In the lat 80's and early 90's, there was virtually free education among London University colleges, even free exchanges of doctoral supervision, from which I benefitted a lot -- I also took several courses and attended seminars at Dept of Computing, Imperial College, London, on applied logics. I wish to register my gratitude here to my teachers from all the three colleges. My study in London was supported by the Sino-British Friendship Scholarship Scheme, to which I am deeply grateful. [For the SBFSS, the British Government contributed the tuition and the book allowance through the British Council, the Chinese Government contributed the living allowance, and Sir Yue-Kong Pao, Hong Kong, contributed the travelling expenses.]

3. By that, I mean I am interested in the study of semantic facts and their fine-grained analysis.

4. Which means I learn whatever I can understand the techniques of logic and use them for linguistic analysis.

5. I take Chinese as consisting of many languages rather than just one Putonghua (General Mandarin) plus all other Han languages as "dialects" by the official decree.

The Bibliophile Exterprise of the JIANGs