My PhD project involves using computational methods and cartographic techniques to explore, visualise and analyse dialectal variation. 

There are two main components in my project: 1) developing a tonal distance metric, investigate how tones vary geographically and how they differ from segments, and 2) developing a method which automatically detects dialect features which are exclusive to specific dialect areas.

Previous studies on tonal variation in dialectology are mainly descriptive. It is still unclear a) whether tonal variation forms a dialect continuum, and if so, b) in what ways do tones differ from one dialect to another? Once there is a method to calculate tone distances between dialects, we can further ask, c) do tonal and segmental variation in a given dialect area correlate with each other?

Dialect groups can now be detected automatically with computational methods. However, these methods are not able to tell us what kinds of features are distinctive for certain dialect groups. The development of an automatic feature detection method is therefore an important step towards the understanding and explanation of the clusters we find in our classification.

In addition, I will address classical dialectological questions (raised in Europe) using Yue as my case study (since it is a genetically, typologically different language with a very different sociolinguistic environment from European languages). Do we find similar patterns in dialectal variation of Yue like we do in Europe? I will also revisit the classification of Yue dialects, including the internal classification within Yue, and the Yue-Pinghua dichotomy. Are Yue and Pinghua two separate Sinitic branches? Is the current classification of Yue justified under data-driven, aggregate dialectology?

I aim to answer questions in both general and language-specific dialectology in my PhD project.

My current supervisor is Assistant Prof. Jelena Prokić and my promotor is Prof. Yiya Chen.