IX CONFERENCE ON ORIENTAL LINGUISTICS, PARIS, 5-6 MAY 1994
VI NORTH AMERICAN CONFERENCE OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS, LOS ANGELES,
13-15 MAY 1994
III INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CHINESE LINGUISTICS, HONGKONG,
14-17 JULY 1994

by Rint Sybesma

In the past few months I had the opportunity to visit three
international conferences on Chinese linguistics, one in Europe,
one in America, and one in Asia.

THE FIRST, THE NEUVI�MES JOURN�ES DE LINGUISTIQUE D'ASIE
ORIENTALE (PARIS, 5-6 May 1994; organized by Laurent Sagart and
Ir�ne Tamba of the Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie
Orientale (CRLAO)), was not limited to Chinese linguistics, as
the name suggests, but half of the presentations were on Chinese.
In Europe, Paris stands out as a centre of Chinese linguistics.
Both the CRLAO and Universit� de Paris VII generate some very
interesting research, which was apparent from the programme of
the Journ�es. The programme offered a great deal of variation,
with historical papers, papers with a theoretical bias, and more
descriptively oriented papers. The subjects of the papers were
as varied, ranging from cleft sentences and the interaction with
focalization and genericity to the domain of quantifying NPs.
Other interesting issues that were dealt with concerned the
grammaticalization of the verb qu `go', a process which can be
observed in other languages as well, and an inventory of negation
in a large number of varieties of Chinese.

THE SECOND CONFERENCE, THE SIXTH NORTH AMERICAN CONFERENCE OF
CHINESE LINGUISTICS (Los Angeles, 13-15 May 1994, organized by
Professor Audrey Li of the University of Southern California, Los
Angeles) was more homogeneous in the sense that most papers
presented here were primarily theoretically oriented. The
programme was packed with high-quality papers from researchers
mainly from US universities, although other people had come from
Taiwan, Europe, Singapore, and Hongkong. 
In the realm of syntax, focus, quantification, and causatives
were important topics, with a number of papers on the quantifier
adverb dou. 

THE THIRD CONFERENCE, THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
CHINESE LINGUISTICS (the annual meeting of the International
Association of Chinese Linguistics), held at the City Polytechnic
of Hongkong from 14-17 July 1994 and organized by Professor
Benjamin T'sou, was again more heterogenous, offering a lot of
papers on diachronic syntax and descriptive papers (for instance,
on Cantonese and Taiwanese), along with papers on language
teaching. There were very few theoretical papers. 

Having attended these conferences, I have to say that generally
a lot of progress seems to have been made in the past ten years
or so in the domain of the research into modern Chinese syntax.
The programmes of these conferences also revealed syntacticians
working in the field of Chinese are facing, and taking up, a new
challenge in the form of the Chinese dialects. In the past, most
research on Chinese has concentrated on the standard variety.
This concentration of attention and investigation has been very
fruitful because in a relatively short period of time, these
combined efforts have yielded considerable insight into this one
variety. Now, however, it seems to be time to disperse and, using
the knowledge of the standard variety, we should direct our
descriptive and theoretical attention towards the syntax of the
Chinese dialects. Careful comparative work has been very fruitful
in the domain of the Germanic and Romance language families, as
well as elsewhere, and it may be expected that this will turn out
to be the case in the Chinese language family. A. Yue-Hashimoto
has made an important first step with the publication in Paris
last year of her guide to Chinese dialect syntax fieldwork. The
CRLAO has also been doing a lot of research on the different
dialects, gathering data and working them out systematically.
Judging from the programmes of the conferences mentioned above,
more researchers are realizing the importance of the Chinese
dialects so I expect this to develop into a very exciting field
of activity in the immediate future.