LEE, Hun-tak Thomas

 

 

Research Interests:

Language acquisition; Syntax and semantics

My interests lie in the logical problem of language acquisition and syntactic/semantic acquisition, with special reference to Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking children. My acquisition research has been related to several topics:

(a) The acquisition of quantifier scope in Mandarin-speaking children, examining children's knowledge of the isomorphic principle in the mapping between logical form and syntax, and how that knowledge may be constrained by locality principles and the thematic hierarchy;

(b) The development of linguistic knowledge in Chinese-speaking children in the transition from babbling to syntax, focusing on issues such as lexical spurt, the onset of syntactic categories, word order and argument structure; the quantificational competence of young children with respect to classifiers, quantifiers and negation; pitch and tone in early phonetic perception and production;

(c) Syntactic development in Cantonese two-to-three-year-olds, with respect to the development of word order and argument structure, questions, pro-drop, sentence final particles, nominal structure and referentiality, and additive/ restrictive focus;

Along with other colleagues based in Hong Kong Polytechnic University and University of Hong Kong (Colleen Wong and Sam Leung), I developed the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus (CANCORP). Since 2002, I have been heading a Chinese Early Language Acquisition (CELA) project in Beijing, Changsha and Hong Kong, investigating how Chinese children acquire the core properties of the target languages from infancy to two years of age.

 

Representative Publications:

• Huang, Aijun and Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2009. Quantification and individuation in the acquisition of Chinese classifiers. In Proceedings of the Tenth Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, ed. Yukio Otsu. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.

• 李行德，2008，漢語兒童對數量名詞短語轄域關係的認識，《當代語言學理論和漢語研究》，沈陽、馮勝利主編，169-191 頁。北京：商務。

• Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2006. A note on garden-path sentences in Chinese. In Linguistic Studies in Chinese and Neighboring Languages: festschrift in honor of Professor Pang-hsin Ting on his seventieth birthday, eds. Dah-an Ho, Samuel Cheung, Wuyun Pan and Fuxiang Wu, 491-518. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica.

• Xiao, Ling, Cai, Xin and Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2006. The development of the verb category and verb argument structures before two years of age. In Proceedings of the Seventh Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, ed. Yukio Otsu, 299-322. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.

• Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2005. The acquisition of additive and restrictive focus in Cantonese. In POLA Forever: Festschrift in Honor of Professor William S-Y. Wang on His 70th Birthday, eds. Dah-an Ho and Ovid J. L. Tzeng, 71-114. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

• Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2003. Two types of logical structure in child language. Journal of Cognitive Science 3, 155-182.

• Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2000. Finiteness and null arguments in Child Cantonese. The Tsinghua Journal of Chinese Studies, New Series, Vol. 30, 365-393.