Biography

I am a corpus linguist, teaching at the Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. I am a full-time faculty member in the Linguistics track.

I got into linguistics long time ago, when I was in my Pronunciation Class as a freshman in college. It was novel to me at that time that sounds could be organized in such a systematic way and how these categories had been effectively applied to the learning of human speech sounds. So I continued with my lingusitic studies ever since ( tribute to my mentor, Cherry Li).

Now I don't really work on the so-called traditional linguistics. Rather, most of my research revolves around the methodology of quantitative corpus linguistics. I am quite interested in the inter-relationship between language, interaction and cognition. A long-time question that I've been working on is how repeated or recurrent language use motivates the emergence of systematic linguistic structures, and how this usage-based view of language is connected to the computational modeling of language processing, language acquisition and learning, and the mental representation of the speakers.

I have published corpus-based works in several academic journals, such as Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Journal of Phonetics, Language Learning, System, Language and Speech and continue to be active in research on a computational approach to language processing. Now I am also on the editorial board of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, which has been a very important journal for me throughout my career. Relatedly, I have witnessed the paradigmatic shift, i.e., the quantitative and computational turn, in corpus linguistics in the past few decades, and also spent an enormous amount of time adjusting myself to this computational mainstream. I won't say it's easy but it is fun.

And, oh yes, I am a fan of and , the two artificial languages that revolutionize the way we process human languages .

Finally, a few things I do if I have extra time: , , , .