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Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman, colleagues and students!Welcome to The Dialogue on Sound Change: Present, Past and Future. I would like to begin by extending a warm welcome to Professor William Labov from the University of Pennsylvania and Professor William Wang from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.It is a great honor to bring two excellent scholars together to have a dialogue on our campus and pay tribute to them for their seminal contribution for the advancement of the theory of sound change.I would like to thank the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the Language Acquisition Laboratory for organizing the Dialogue .This is the first event jointly organized by the two departments in the Faculty of Arts. A big “Thank You” here is especially given to Professor Thomas Lee, Professor Feng Shengli, and Professor Virginia Yip. As the Chairman of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, I am pleased to see that colleagues in our department are collaborating with linguists in the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages in organizing this event. The collaboration of the two departments is very important for the provision of a sound training in Chinese linguistics. I am looking forward to the next event to be jointly organized by the two departments in the near future. On behalf of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, I wish the two guest speakers a successful dialogue this afternoon. Thank you.
Prof. Ho, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is my tremendous honor to welcome the two distinguished Bills to The Dialogue on Sound Change on behalf of the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages. This is a much anticipated event jointly organized by our department, the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the Language Acquisition Laboratory.Special thanks are due to Prof. Thomas Lee and Prof. Feng Shengli who will be moderators of the Q & A sessions. We are specially honored by the presence of many invited scholars and researchers who conduct research on language variation and change in relation to the diachronic development of Chinese languages and dialects.
The dialogue and forum we are about to launch is significant at two levels. First, from the perspective of Chinese linguistics, sound change in Chinese has played a crucial role since Bill Wang first used evidence from Chinese dialects to show how sound change spreads through the lexicon. Second, for linguistics at large, sound change has provided fundamental theoretical grounding in linguistics since the 19th century when the Neogrammarians discovered how sound change follows regular laws. Those pioneers developed principles such as Grimm’s Law to explain the regularities they observed. But even they were not yet able to explain how or why sound change took place. Bill Labov’s work has elucidated how social factors such as class, ethnicity and gender can influence sound change with massive databases.
Our two distinguished speakers have each made seminal contributions to our understanding of sound change and nurtured generations of students and leaders of our field, some of whom are present in this audience. The purpose of the forum is to engage the two scholars in an extended dialogue with each other and with an audience so that they can update us on their current views on theories of sound change and lexical diffusion, with the hindsight of 40 years of empirical research on these topics.
We thank you all for being part of this significant event in the history of linguistics at CUHK. I look forward to a stimulating dialogue between the two speakers, our panelists and participants.I hope the scholarly exchanges in our forum inspire generations of students and colleagues to pursue scientific research which will resolve many of the challenging issues of how sound change affects human lives, from the first words that infants understand to the dialogues that resonate in our memories across our own lives and beyond.
May I now invite Prof. Feng to introduce the speakers?