Hello! I'm Jess Law (羅海琪), an Assistant Professor in Department of Linguistics at University of California, Santa Cruz. My research interests lie in semantics and pragmatics, especially of Chinese languages. I leverage experimentation, statistical modeling, and computational methods to probe how meaning is constructed in context, across multiple modalities. Please refer to the Research page for more details about my research.
Before coming to UC Santa Cruz, I studied at Rutgers University for my PhD and Chinese University of Hong Kong for my MPhil and BA. I go by both Jess and 海琪 (pronounced as hɔɪ keɪ in Cantonese). It's hard to resist thinking about language, but when I managed not to, I enjoy reading about philosophy, science, and history.
Bio
I am an immigrant, a scientist, and an immigrant scientist. I want to share with you how I have moved, both in life and in scientific fields, and how I am thankful for these experiences and the people I met along the way.
My Hakka family moved from Mainland China to Hong Kong when I was 10, when Hong Kong was still a British colony. I struggled to learn English for many years and had always thought the language had a horrible grammar. (I used to picture an evil grammarian writing English rules to torture children around the world.) My view gradually changed when I enrolled in the linguistics program in CUHK. From the world-class program (QS ranking: 25 😜), I learned that English, despite being a 'bastard language', has a beautiful grammar. In fact, there are many varieties of English, all with their own beautiful grammars. I also learned that all languages have beautiful grammars, including Cantonese, which is a spoken language with a young alphabet writing system designed by the Linguistics Society of Hong Kong. I managed to pick up two more languages during my time at CUHK---Spanish and Japanese, which turned out to serve me well. This experience helped me move beyond my resentment toward English and became a language lover!
But I learned more than linguistic equity alone. I came to see that language can be studied with scientific rigor, and that this scientific orientation is precisely what makes linguistics compelling across both the humanities and the sciences. I have been extremely lucky to always be around people who love linguistics---people who think scientifically tend to do well. At CUHK, I was inspired by the linguistics faculty (notably Candice Cheung, Peggy Mok, Patrick Wong, Gloria Zhang, and Virginia Yip) and a stream of scholars visiting Hong Kong, mainly from the United States, including James Huang (Harvard University), Audrey Li (University of Southern California), and Yafei Li (University of Wisconsin, Madison). I was very interested in Generative Syntax under the influence of these scholars, enough to consider enrolling in a graduate program.
My interest took me to Rutgers University, where I became interested in Semantics. Thanks to the guidance of Veneeta Dayal, Simon Charlow, Kristen Syrett, and Maria Bittner, I was able to learn a variety of approaches to Semantics, often from their arguments. To honor my education at Rutgers and my tri-lingual education from Hong Kong, I wrote a dissertation on distributive quantification in three languages: English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. It is when I wrote this dissertation that I got to appreciate Hong Kong's highly demanding tri-lingual language curriculum.
I moved to UC Santa Cruz to join the Linguistics Department after concluding my PhD. I was able to conduct research using linguistic experimentation, with the support of colleagues like Amanda Rysling, Matt Wagers, and Dustin Chacon. I also learned computational linguistics, which greatly fascinates me, from colleagues Adrian Brasoveanu and Pranav Anand. I learned to appreciate syntax and its close relationship with semantics, from talking with colleagues Mia Gong, Ivy Sichel, and Roumi Pancheva.
My luck did not stop. My partner Haoze Li recently joined the Department of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. It is a phenomenal department (QS ranking: 13 😄), with lots of wonderful linguists working on subfields like sociolinguistics, phonetics, and language policies. It is from interactions with linguists like K.K. Luke, Li Nguyen, Lim Ni Eng, and Tan Ying Ying from LMS and Chinese that I started to work on final particles in Chinese languages and multimodal pragmatics.
It took me many years to figure out what I want to work on and how to work on it in a way meaningful to science. Without the open-mindedness of my peers and colleagues, I won't be able to dabble in many areas, let alone picking up useful tools and methods and building a professional network to support my research in the process. I want to thank those who have supported me on the journey. If you are in linguistics and feeling that your research interests do not click with those around you, please do not despair. You just need to move a little and find a community that values your contribution. When a linguist moves, they usually discover exciting new language opportunities!