C.-T. James Huang

C.-T. James Huang
黃正德
Huang in 2017
Born1948 (age 77–78)
Alma mater
Known for
Scientific career
FieldsLinguistics
InstitutionsHarvard University
ThesisLogical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar (1982)
Doctoral advisors
Websitescholar.harvard.edu/ctjhuang

C.T. James Huang (Chinese: 黃正德; born 1948) is a Taiwanese-American linguist. He is an emeritus professor of linguistics at Harvard University.

Early life and education

Huang was born in the small township of Fuli, Hualien, in Taiwan. He graduated from National Taiwan Normal University with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 1971 and a Master of Arts (M.A.) in 1974. He then completed doctoral studies in the United States on a Fulbright fellowship, earning his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. He wrote his doctoral dissertation, "Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar," under linguists Noam Chomsky and Kenneth L. Hale.

Career

He received the Linguistic Society of Taiwan's Lifetime Achievement award in 2014 and was elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2015.[1] In 2016, he was elected an Academician in the Convocation of the Academia Sinica's division of Humanities and Social Sciences.[2][3] In 2019 he was elected a Member of Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe).[4][5]

Huang has published articles and books in both English and Mandarin Chinese within the generative grammar framework of linguistics, extensively on the structure of Mandarin Chinese grammar. His influence in the field is widely credited for "paving the way and leading the development of Chinese theoretical syntax"; "without his pioneering research [...] such a field would not exist in the rich way we presently know it".[6] In 2009, Huang collaborated with Y.-H. Audrey Li and Yafei Li to co-author a Cambridge Syntax Guide spanning the work of the past 25 years in theoretical Chinese syntax.[7] In 2015, Huang received a Festschrift comprising the work of 21 specialists in Chinese syntax, which is headlined by his own most recent publication on the subject of both synchronic and diachronic approaches to syntactic analyticity in Chinese parametric grammar.[8]

On 24 April 2024, Huang announced his retirement after teaching for 45 years.

Books

References

  1. ^ "LSA Fellows by Year of Inductions". Retrieved 16 April 2016.
  2. ^ "C.-T. James Huang". Academia Sinica. Retrieved 16 March 2022.
  3. ^ "Council of Academia Sinica". Archived from the original on 25 October 2017. Retrieved 25 October 2017.
  4. ^ "Week of November 24, 2014". 23 November 2014. Retrieved 16 April 2016.
  5. ^ "Academy of Europe: List of Members".
  6. ^ Li, Audrey; Simpson, Andrew; Tsai, Wei-Tien Dylan, eds. (2015). Chinese Syntax in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-994565-8. Retrieved 16 April 2016.
  7. ^ Huang, C.-T. James; Li, Y.-H. Audrey; Li, Yafei (2009). The Syntax of Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-59058-7.
  8. ^ "C.-T. James Huang's Representative Publications". Retrieved 16 April 2016.