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Professor William S.-Y. Wang received his early education in China and completed his secondary education in New York City.His early interest in language was inspired by the linguistic courses he took while studying engineering and social sciences at Columbia College. Professor Wang went on for graduate studies in Linguistics with Gordon Peterson at the University of Michigan, completing his doctoral degree there in 1960.
Professor Wang taught at Ohio State University in the early 1960s where he helped establish the Division of Linguistics and the Division of East Asian Languages and Literature. He joined the Department of Linguistics of University of California at Berkeley in 1965 as Professor. While at Berkeley, he set up the Phonology Laboratory there, the Project on Linguistic Analysis (POLA), an influential center for interdisciplinary research on Chinese, and founded the Journal of Chinese Linguistics in 1973. Professor Wang moved to Hong Kong in 1995 to take up a Chair Professorship in Language Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong. He joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2005 and has been Research Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering, the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, and the Center for East Asian Studies.
While his early doctoral research focused on the acoustic phonetics of English (Wang & Peterson 1958; Wang 1959), Professor Wang was among the first group of linguists to contribute to generative grammar from the vantage point of Chinese, notably in his syntactic analysis of Chinese aspect markers and conjoining and deletion (Wang 1965, 1967a) and the distinctive feature system he proposed for the treatment of tones (Wang 1967b; Wang & Li 1967).
Professor Wang recognized early the great potential in computers for research on language. This led to the construction of a dynamic bibliography of Chinese linguistics (Wang & Lyovin eds. 1970), as well as one of the earliest data-bases motivated for reconstruction of historical phonology (Wang 1970).
In the ensuing years, Professor Wang soon departed from the premises of generative grammar, and moved to issues of language variation and evolution. In a seminal paper (Wang 1969), he advocated the view that sound change may be phonetically abrupt and lexically gradual, so that irregularities in sound change may not be simply the result of borrowing and analogy, but rather the consequence of lexical diffusion. His proposal received support from some wellestablished facts of tone and consonant changes in Chinese phonology(e.g. Cheng & Wang 1971; Wang & Cheng 1987). The theory has stimulated efforts to analyze the development of other languages(e.g. English, Tibetan, German, Swedish, Dravidian) along similar lines, including child language (see Wang ed. 1977). It has led to studies of morphosyntactic change in Chinese, and has been enriched by observations of bidirectional diffusion between the literary and colloquial tiers of a language (Wang & Lien 1993). While the concept of lexical diffusion was first developed in the context of sound change,it can be readily applied to morphology, syntax, and semantics (Ogura& Wang 1995, 1996).
Besides the theory of lexical diffusion, Professor Wang has worked intensively over the last thirty years on methodological and conceptual issues of language evolution, with particular reference to the history of Chinese languages and peoples, synthesizing findings from anthropology, genetics and linguistics (Wang 1978, 1998;Cavalli-Sforza & Wang 1986). Employing various computer models,he and his associates have tackled issues such as how one might separate the effects of horizontal and vertical transmission in language change (Wang & Wang 2004; Wang & Minett 2005a, 2005b), how linguistic signs and word order evolve (Wang, Ke & Minett 2004;Gong & Wang 2005; Gong, Minett & Wang 2009), and how bilingual contact affects language shift (Minett & Wang 2008).
A third strand of Professor Wang’s research lies in his comparative cognitive studies of language, seeking to understand how Chinese speakers process speech and words, in ways that may resemble or differ from speakers of other languages, at the behavioral and neuropsychological levels. His early collaboration with Professor Ovid Tzeng has demonstrated that Chinese speakers process characters in the left hemisphere, against the then common belief that Chinese characters, being logograms, may be processed in the right hemisphere (Tzeng, Hung, Cotton & Wang 1979). In recent years, working with members of his Language Engineering Lab(Shuai Lan, Zheng Hongying, Peng Gang & James Minett), Professor Wang has used imaging techniques to study brain lateralization in tone perception and character reading (Peng & Wang 2011), as well as categorical perception of pitch contours. Their findings demonstrate that lateralization in tone perception is not an absolute phenomenon but depends crucially on the contour and temporal properties of the tones concerned. Their results also indicate a clear effect of speakers’linguistic background on their categorical perception of pitch contours(Peng et al . 2010; Zheng et al. 2012; Zhang et al . 2013).
Professor Wang is a strong believer in cross-fertilization across disciplines as a productive approach in linguistic research, especially given how language is ubiquitous in all human affairs. He has coauthored papers with anthropologists (Schoenemann, Budinger,Sarich & Wang 2000), geneticists (Cavalli-Sforza & Wang 1986),mathematicians (Freedman & Wang 1996), psychologists (Tzeng &Wang 1984), and frequently works in collaboration with engineers.In Wang (1998), he attempted to integrate the findings of archeology,genetics and linguistics toward understanding the past of the languages and peoples of China. He taught twice at the Santa Fe Summer Institute of Complexity Studies, where both the faculty and the students come from many disciplines.
Even while a graduate student, Professor Wang had a strong interest in evolutionary thinking, pondering on parallels between biology and linguistics. He is convinced that concepts like variation,selection, and transmission are central for understanding the dynamics in both fields (Wang 1982). He recently helped initiate a series of annual Conference In Evolutionary Linguistics (CIEL) in China.
Professor Wang is particularly gratified to be part of the Joint Research Centre of Language and Human Complexity, just established in August 2013 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Centre collaborates with partner centers at Peking University and at the University System of Taiwan.
Professor Wang was the Founding President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (1992-1993), and was elected to Academia Sinica in 1992. He has been fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford twice (19691970, 1983-1984), and a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship (19781979), as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Center for Advanced Studies in Bellagio, Italy and the International Institute for Advanced Study in Kyoto, Japan.
(Homepage: http://www.ee.cuhk.edu.hk/~wsywang/)