organized by Changliang Qu (Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China)
As the renowned Swedish Sinologist Göran Malmqvist (1924-2019) noted in the first volume of Giulio Lepschy’s History of Linguistics, China has a philological tradition of its own for at least two millennia. Its isolation was broken, however, as the encounters of civilizations in the modern time witnessed the exchange of ideas in humanities and social sciences, including those in philology and linguistics. In 1923, when The Commercial Press in Shanghai republished Rudiments of the Chinese Spoken Language, an “avant-garde” but formerly not well-circulated linguistic treatise written a decade ago by the late linguist Hu Yilu (1888-1917), the wider availability of this book made many more language researchers in China realize that Hu Yilu was advocating an approach to the language studies extremely different from what they had been familiar with.
Today, while Hu Yilu is remembered as the first scholar who introduced the Western-styled general linguistics to China, it is not exaggerating to believe that he also opened the era in which Chinese linguists actively absorbed the imported theories and applied them to the research on the local linguistic resources: Otto Jespersen’s philosophy of grammar offered new insights to the description of the non-inflectional Chinese structure. Field workers equipped with American Descriptivism and/or European Structuralisms investigated and described numerous Chinese dialects and minority languages all through the 20th century. Since the end of 1970s, structuralism, generativism, as well as functionalism have been widely discussed and employed among the Chinese linguists, and more classic works have been translated into Chinese.
The present workshop focuses on the interaction between Western general linguistics and linguistics in China. Currently four presentations have been scheduled:
Liu, Yuhang :
Dissemination of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in China: Misunderstanding and beyond
Hu, Tianze :
Unveiling the Dissemination Challenges: André Martinet’s functional linguistics in the Chinese academic landscape
Guo, Wei :
Does Jespersen influence Halliday? A ‘minor’ case in the linguistic historiography
Qu, Changliang :
Chinese data in N.S. Trubetzkoy’s Phonological Works: How much are second-handed data reliable?
This workshop is intended to be an open workshop. We warmly welcome colleagues fro m all over the world to join in and fill the slots.
Workshop title :
Western General Linguistics and China: 101 Years after Hu Yilu’s Rudiments of the Chinese Spoken Language
Workshop organizer:
Qu, Changliang (Professor of Linguistics, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China)
Email of workshop organizer: quchangliang@dlufl.edu.cn;
bonjourleo@126.com.
Workshop description:
Interaction between Western general linguistics and linguistics in China
ICHoLS 