Graduate seminar focusing on Cantonese linguistics. Topics based on student interest, drawing from: lexical and formal semantics, conversation analysis, syntax, discourse and pragmatics, variation, social meaning, phonology, diachronics, dialectology, phonetics, computational analysis, psycholinguistics and more. Prerequisite: graduate standing in linguistics or permission of instructor and knowledge of at least a basic amount of some Chinese (any 方言).
Thursdays 3:00 - 5:00 pm, Greenberg Room
Dan Jurafsky
Email: jurafsky@stanford.edu
Class Office Hours: Thursdays 5:00pm after class
| Class Participation: | 10% “ “ |
| Discussion Leadership: | 30% “ “ |
| Final Paper (for those enrolling for 4 units): | 60% “ “ |
| Discussion Questions: | Wednesdays before 5:00 pm (each week) |
| Project Proposal (for if 4 units): | Oct 10 midnight |
| Rough Draft of Project (if 4 units): | Nov 14 midnight |
| Final Project Writeup (if 4 units) | Dec 12 midnight |
| Sep 26 | Sick |
| Week 2 Oct 3 | Introduction |
| Week 3 Oct 10 | Dan: Sentence-Final Particles |
| Week 4 Oct 17 | Yin Lin and Irene: Sound Change in Progress |
| Week 5 Oct 24 | Mary: Phonological Reconstruction |
| Week 6 Oct 31 | Sam: Linguistics of Smell |
| Week 7 Nov 7 | Siva: Psycholinguistics of Production/Syntax |
| Week 8 Nov 14 | Jasper: Clefting |
| Week 9 Nov 21 | Alan: Written Cantonese |
| Nov 28 | NO CLASS – Thanksgiving Recess |
| Week 10 Dec 5 | TBD in the Field |
This is a seminar and we are constructing the intellectual space together, so it's important that you come each time and complete the readings prior to class. The discussion and interaction during class time will be an integral part of the course.
Each week you will come up with at least two discussion questions based on the readings. The questions will help us to understand common points of interest. And the discussion leaders will use them to help guide the discussion in class. These questions should not be descriptive (Author X said Y).! Instead, they should be probing, analytical, and thought-provoking. The quality of our discussions will critically depend on your discussion question contribution! Your questions should be posted on Canvas no later than 5 PM each Wednesday
You will help lead the discussion for one session during the quarter. (If you do this in a group, you will meet with your group partner(s) beforehand to agree on the questions and issues you will use to frame and guide the discussion.) You should point out big themes and place the research in context. What is the value of the work? Why does this work matter to linguistics? And could the research have implications outside of academic linguistics? Bring in your own expertise on the issues to help inform the class and to push us beyond the readings.
On the web, except you'll want access to a copy of
Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip. 2011. Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. 2nd edition. Routledge.
You might want to buy your own (if so make sure to get the 2nd edition), but in any case I've put a copy on reserve in the library and I'll leave another copy in the department and you can also borrow my copy.
For students enrolling for 4 units, the final project should be a research project related to Cantonese that is helpful to you in your own progress as an academic linguist. This could be something in your expected dissertation direction that could be a thesis chapter, or a side paper that gets published, or maybe just a pilot study, or something to fulfill the in-depth language requirement. Or maybe just a question you always wanted to know the answer to. But the trick is to find a question that's important and not just incremental or merely cute.
Chor, Winnie. 2018. Sentence final particles as epistemic modulators in Cantonese conversations: A discourse-pragmatic perspective." Journal of Pragmatics 129 (2018): 34-47.
Matthews, Stephen. 1998. "Evidentiality and mirativity in Cantonese: wo3, wo4, wo5." In Proceedings of the international symposium on Chinese languages and linguistics, pp. 325-334. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1998.
Ka Fai Law. An Attempt to Differentiate Two Epistemic SFPs in Hong Kong Cantonese. Current Research in Chinese Linguistics, 101-111
Cheng, Lauretta SP, Molly Babel, and Yao Yao. 2022. "Production and perception across three Hong Kong Cantonese consonant mergers: Community-and individual-level perspectives." Laboratory Phonology 13, no. 1 (2022).
Fung, Roxana SY, and Chris KC Lee. 2019. "Tone mergers in Hong Kong Cantonese: An asymmetry of production and perception." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 146, no. 5 (2019): EL424-EL430.
(optional): Mok, Peggy PK, Donghui Zuo, and Peggy WY Wong. 2013. "Production and perception of a sound change in progress: Tone merging in Hong Kong Cantonese." Language variation and change 25, no. 3 (2013): 341-370.
Handel, Zev. 2014. "Historical Phonology of Chinese." Chapter 22 of C.-T. James Huang, Y.-H. Audrey Li, Andrew Simpson (eds.). The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons pages 576-598.
S. Robert Ramsey. 1987. The Languages of China. Princeton University Press, pages 125-134.
W. South Coblin. 2022. A Problem in the Application of the Comparative Method to the Reconstruction of Earlier Forms of Chinese. 中國語言學集刊 Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics 15: 1-19, DOI:10.30184/BCL.202212_15.0006. SKIP SECTION 4 ON ALGONQUIN.
Hilário de Sousa. 2011. Changes in the Language of Perception in Cantonese. Sense & Society 6:1.
Majid, Asifa. 2021. "Human olfaction at the intersection of language, culture, and biology." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 25, no. 2 (2021): 111-123.
Francis, Elaine J., Charles Lam, Carol Chun Zheng, John Hitz, and Stephen Matthews. 2015. "Resumptive pronouns, structural complexity, and the elusive distinction between grammar and performance: Evidence from Cantonese." Lingua 162 (2015): 56-81.
Bauer, Robert S. (2020). "Introduction: Written Chinese" from "ABC Cantonese-English comprehensive dictionary", pages xxiv-xxxvii. University of Hawaii Press.
Chan, Marjorie K. M. 2022. "Vernacular Written Cantonese in the Twentieth Century". In Studies in Colloquial Chinese and Its History: Dialect and Text.
