Robert Bauer
Honorary Professor
Email: rsbao@yahoo.com
Leo Francis Hoye
Honorary Associate Professor
Leo Francis Hoye was educated in Britain, France and Romania and is a versatile educator, researcher and writer with broad international experience. He has worked with governmental, public and other agencies in Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and, most recently, Hong Kong SAR. Formerly Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at The University of Hong Kong and now an Honorary Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts (School of Humanities, Linguistics), Leo divides his time between teaching, editing, writing, and public speaking. Recent presentations at home or overseas include: ‘Engaging Across Cultures: Developing Effective Communication Strategies’ (Romania); ‘Corporate Happiness [sic] Responsibility’ (HK), and ‘Whose English? The “English Effect” in a Global World and a Global Market’ (HK).
Leo’s current academic research interests include semantics and pragmatics (notably modality and evidentiality) and visual pragmatics / multimodality.
Leo teaches in semantics and pragmatics.
Email: leohoye@hku.hk
Room: Room 9.22, RRST, Centennial Campus
Consultation by appointment only.
Chin-lung Yang
Honorary Associate Professor
Dr. Chin Lung Yang currently works as a senior research scientist in Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the cognitive and neurocognitive basis of high-order language (sentence/text) comprehension, bilingual processing, and language learning, authoring some 20ish research articles in journals and books of psycholinguistics and language learning (with an average impact factor ~3.10 and h-index 13). Some of his works appear in journals of Neuropsychologia (2018), Brain and Language (2010, 2014), Cognition (2003, 2010), JEP: LMC (2007), Applied Cognition (2008), Language and Cognitive Processes (1999), etc.; and books of Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Linguistics (2023), Learning to Read Across Languages: Cross-linguistic Relationships in First- and Second-language Literacy Development (2008), Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics: Vol. I: Chinese Psycholinguistics (2006), etc.
Dr. Hing Yuet Fung
Adjunct Part-time Lecturer
Dr. Fung specialises in the performance theory of typology, on how the universal preference of processing efficiency predicts alternative linguistic constructions. Her research interests include adverb positions and numeral classifier constructions. She is currently developing corpus studies in Japanese.
Thomas van Hoey
Part-time Lecturer
Dr. Thomas Van Hoey is a postdoctoral assistant at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), focusing on the relationship between grammatical variation and complexity, in collaboration with Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. This work is embedded squarely within the Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL) research group in the Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven.
The other side of his work focuses on understanding how people construe meaning through ideophones and iconicity, while balancing cognitive and cultural factors. Previously, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong, in the Language and Development Lab, led by Youngah Do. Their main project, together with Mark Dingemanse and Arthur Lewis Thompson, focused on the learnability of ideophones from a cross-linguistic perspective while focusing on the artiuculatory and gesticulatory gestures of the ideophonic items.
By training, he is a sinologist and a linguist, with a PhD in Linguistics (obtained at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics of National Taiwan University). His MA degrees in Sinology and Linguistics were obtained at the University of Leuven.
His PhD dissertation (2020), “Prototypicality and salience of Chinese ideophones: A cognitive and corpus linguistics approach”, supervised by Lu Chiarung, investigates the Chinese ideophonic lexicon through four different methodological lenses: multiple correspondence analysis, diachronic prototype semantics, semantic vector spaces, and collostructional analysis. A prototypical structuring of the ideophonic lexicon is found throughout the data, which is collected from the corpus as well as the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD). CHIDEOD is freely accessible online in multiple formats.
Dr. Hanbo Liao
Adjunct Part-time Lecturer
Hanbo’s PhD study is in the formation of the linguistics areal features in the Lingnan region of China in diachronic and typological perspectives. His field of study includes Historical and Comparative Linguistics, Phonology, Phonetics, Grammar, Tonology, Language Typology, Areal linguistics and Language Contact, Bilingualism/Multilingualism and Sociolinguistics, focusing on the Kra-Dai, Southern Sinitic, Austronesian, and Vietic languages. Before joining HKU, he has completed his MA study in Payap University, by conducting a study on tonal development of Tai languages. On that basic he has proposed a practical Tai tone-box scheme which claims to capture all tonal distinctions in any Tai language (Liao forthcoming). Hanbo also focuses on the bilingual development of Zhuang children, and from 2019, he has started to compile a Yang Zhuang-Chinese-English-Thai online dictionary and an introductory textbook of Yang Zhuang language, hoping to provide resources for children’s bilingual teaching of Zhuang-Chinese in the future.
In addition to his linguistic studies, Hanbo is also a philologist in Kra-Dai languages’ oral literature. Since 2008, he has been participating in the protection and inheritance of intangible cultural heritage in the Zhuang areas of China, and helped Jingxi City of Guangxi to successfully apply for the registration of Mot Lan, a Southern Zhuang melodious art, onto the list of the national intangible cultural heritage units in 2020.
Liao Hanbo. (forthcoming). An Integrated Tone Box Scheme for Determining Tones in Tai Varieties beyond Southwestern Tai: Diachronic and Synchronic Concerns. Folia Linguistica Historica.
Email: lhb77610@connect.hku.hk
Personal webpage
Ralph Chun Yin Liu
Part-time Lecturer
Dr. Liu is our Phd Graduate working on the neuroscience of reading. He is interested in using neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI to probe into the mind and cognition. His research goal is to find out a unified theory of the brain network of reading and reading disorders.
Pui Yiu Szeto
Part-time Lecturer
Dr. Pui Yiu Szeto currently holds the position of Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He earned his PhD in Linguistics from The University of Hong Kong in 2019. Dr. Szeto’s research interests lie primarily in language contact and linguistic typology, with a focus on Sinitic languages and their linguistic neighbours. His scholarly contributions have been featured in esteemed journals such as Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, Folia Linguistica, Journal of Language Contact, Linguistic Typology, and Linguistics.