Yen-hui Audrey Li, Ph.D. (University of Southern California); joint appointment with Linguistics. Audrey Li is interested in the structural properties of natural languages: how and why human languages are the way they are and how and why languages differ in the way they do. The theme of her works is that languages differ in a principled and systematic manner. Meaningful cross-linguistic comparison is based on in-depth investigation of individual languages. The topics of her research include the issues related to constituency and order at the sentential and nominal level, the interpretive mechanisms in universal grammar and the well-formedness conditions on the interpretation and spell-out of syntactic structures. The data have been mainly drawn from English and East Asian languages from a comparative perspective. Li is also quite interested in the issues regarding language acquisition and pedagogical implications. She directs the EALC Chinese language Program. Li’s important publications include the following books: Essays on the representational and derivational nature of grammar: the diversity of wh-constructions (with Joseph Aoun). 2003, MIT Press. Functional Structure(s), Form and Interpretation, (ed. with Andrew Simpson). 2003, RoutledgeCurzon Press. New Horizons in Chinese Linguistics, 1996 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (ed. with James Huang). Syntax of Scope, 1993. MIT Press (with J. Aoun), Order and Constituency in Mandarin Chinese, 1990, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.

Chinese language and linguistics