Hongyuan Dong

Teaching Assistant Professor of Chinese

PhD in Linguistics, Cornell University

Research Background

I am a linguist, specializing in formal semantics. My research explores the mechanism of interpretation in natural language, especially Chinese, to see how meaning is derived compositionally and what cross-linguistic or language-specific rules there are to account for the similarities and differences between languages. I also look at ways to represent deeper and more ambiguity-free meaning structures with logic formalisms to bring out the finer, but important nevertheless, shades of what we mean by what we say.

Area of Research

Formal Semantics, Chinese Linguistics, Philosophy of Language, Daoism.

Current Projects

First, I am examining the philosophy of language in The Book of Zhuangzi using contemporary semantic concept. My research is concerned with how linguistic meaning is regarded and conveyed in the Chinese language from the perspective of Zhuangzi's theory on language and meaning. Second, I am continuing the work in my dissertation on the interrogative semantics of Mandarin questions, currently looking at the phonological-semantic correlation between wh-scope and phonological prominence.

Publications

Dong, Hongyuan (2007) The Semantics of Wh-Questions with the verbal "how" in Mandarin, in Proceedings of the Sixteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, edited by Maria Aloni, et al.

Shen, Yang, and Dong, Hongyuan (2004) The Intrasentential Co-reference Rules of 3rd Person Pronoun "ta" in Chinese. Zhongguo Yuwen (Journal of Chinese Linguistics) 2004:1, Beijing, China.

Courses Taught

Introduction to Linguistics, Beginning / Intermediate / Heritage / Intensive Chinese Courses, and Event Semantics (all at Cornell University)

Beginning Chinese (at GWU)

Contact Information

Dept of East Asian Languages and Literature
The George Washington University
Rome Hall 467
801 22nd Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052