Schedule
The conference program, including activities connected with the conference, will be posted here when it becomes available. We plan to have a preliminary program online by mid to late February. In the meantime, our invited speakers are introduced in the next section below. The conference extends into three days, beginning on Friday morning (25 April 2008) with a number of invited speakers (see below), and ending around noon on Sunday (27 April 2008). NACCL-20 will be held on The Ohio State University campus in multimedia classrooms (with computer, LCD projector, etc.) in Ramseyer Hall (Building 090, 29 W. Woodruff Avenue), on the corner of West Woodruff Avenue and North High Street, across from campus district shops and eateries.
Special Invited Guest and Speaker
Edwin G. Pulleyblank (蒲立本), Professor Emeritus (since retirement in 1988), U. of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. (See flyer (pdf).)
Born in the city of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, Professor Pulleyblank is one of the world’s most respected and influential scholars in Chinese linguistics and Chinese history. During his long and productive career dedicated to sinology that spans half a century, Professor Pulleyblank has published widely on Chinese history, Chinese historical linguistics, and general linguistics. With respect to Chinese linguistics, his research and publications—in both articles and books—have had immense impact in shaping the ideas of his peers and of later generations of scholars researching in Chinese linguistics, especially in Chinese historical phonology and classical Chinese grammar. As our special invited guest and speaker who has graciously accepted our invitation to join in celebrating NACCL's 20th anniversary, the Proceedings of the Twentieth North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics will be affectionately dedicated to Professor Pulleyblank, in honor of his eighty-fifth birthday, which he celebrated on 7 August 2007.
Professor Pulleyblank's lecture, co-sponsored by The Institute for Chinese Studies, will be part of the Institute's "Rethinking China Lecture Series." As a result, Professor Pulleyblank's lecture will not be restricted to conference attendees but will be a public lecture that is open to everyone. (See the flyer for the public lecture (pdf).)
[Note: We are deeply saddened that Professor Edwin G. Pulleyblank passed away on Saturday, 13 April 2013, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.]
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
James H-Y. Tai (戴浩一), Distinguished University Professor, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan
Professor Tai was the architect and senior organizer of NACCL-1 (NECCL-1) while he was a faculty member at The Ohio State University. His keynote speech for NACCL-20 is entitled "Chinese Grammar: Perspectives from Sign Language."
Yen-hui Audrey Li (李艷惠), University of Southern California
Professor Li organized NACCL-6, and is the creator of the NACCL Proceedings series that has, since NACCL-6, been distributed by USC's GSIL Publications. Her keynote speech for NACCL-20 is entitled "Case, 20 Years Later."
MORE INVITED SPEAKERS
Thomas Ernst (殷天兴), University of Massachusetts, and Dartmouth College Professor Ernst organized NACCL-5, and created and coordinated the NACCL Steering Committee to ensure that NACCL conferences would be hosted each year, and that new hosts would be able to receive advice for hosting the conference. His presentation is entitled "Adverbs and polarity in Mandarin."
Robert Sanders (沈德思), University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Professor Sanders is returning for a reunion as the third of the original trio who organized the first NACCL conference at The Ohio State University. His presentation will be on "Tonetic sound change in Taiwan Mandarin: The case of Tone 2 and Tone 3 citation contours."