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Hilary CHAPPELL

Directeur d'études EHESS

Français

Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale, EHESS,

54 Bd Raspail, 75270 cedex Paris, France.

Phone (office) : + 33 (1) 49 54 24 31

e-mail

Research Interests

Typology of Sinitic Languages

My main research is on the typology of Sinitic languages and the extent of their grammatical diversity. This involves a comparison of eight principal language groups from the perspective of serial verb constructions where the first verb has grammaticalized into a preposition, if not into a marker of construction types such as the passive, comparative or the causative.

Languages represented in this research project are Southern Min of Taiwan, Hong Kong Cantonese (Yue), Shanghainese (Wu), Beijing Mandarin, the Xiang dialects of Hunan, Nanchang Gan, Meizhou Hakka and the Jin dialects of Shanxi.

Diachronic Syntax of Southern Min

In the last few years,  I have also begun to work on the diachronic syntax of Southern Min (Hokkien) with Prof. Alain Peyraube, CNRS–EHESS, Paris, using a corpus of late 16th and early 17th century materials compiled by Spanish missionaries. For example, the grammatical features of comitatives in Medieval Chinese are compared with the same phenomenon in early and contemporary Southern Min.

Research grants and projects

• The hybrid syntactic typology of Sinitic languages (ERC Project: European Research Council, Advanced Grants category. Sinotype 230388)
  
  English synopsis  /  Résumé du projet
  Project (English version)
  
  

• Changement diachronique en min méridional, langue sinitique / Diachronic change in Southern Min, a Sinitic language
  (Project funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche and Taiwan National Science Council de Taiwan)
  Chairs of project: Hilary Chappell & Alain Peyraube
  Duration: 36 months from 01/11/08
  Funding : 250.000 €
  
  Project (English version)
  

Publications

Books

• 1995. The grammar of inalienability. A typological perspective on body parts terms and the part-whole relation. (Empirical approaches to language typology 14). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (xiii + 931 pp.) [avec William McGregor (editeurs/auteurs)].

• 2001. Sinitic grammar: synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Oxford:  Oxford University Press. (429 pp., dialect map of China) [editeur/auteur]. (2ème édition, 2004 sous le titre Chinese grammar: synchronic and diachronic perspectives).

• 2005. A grammar and lexicon of Hakka: Historical materials from the Basel Mission Library. Collection des Cahiers de Linguistique – Asie Orientale 8, Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [avec Christine Lamarre].
  

Articles (selection)

• 1999. The double unaccusative in Sinitic languages. In: Doris L. Payne and Immanuel Barshi (eds.) External Possession and related noun incorporation constructions. (Typological Studies in Language Series 39). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 197–232.

• Dialect grammar in two early modern Southern Min texts: A comparative study of dative kit, comitative cang and diminutive –guia. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 28.2(2000): 247–302.
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following webpage: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe.php?id=825

• 2001. Language contact and areal diffusion in Sinitic languages:  problems for typology and genetic affiliation, In: Alexandra Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon  (eds.) Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: problems in comparative  linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 328–357.
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following webpage: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe.php?id=813

• Le hakka (avec Laurent Sagart)
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following website: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00087316/fr/

• 2001. The experiential perfect as an evidential marker in Sinitic languages. (Pre-publication version of ‘A typology of evidential markers in Sinitic languages’ In H. Chappell (ed.) Sinitic grammar: synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Oxford: University Press, 56-84.)
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following website: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00273298/fr/

• 2001. Synchrony and diachrony of Sinitic languages: A brief history of Chinese dialects. In: H. Chappell (ed.) Sinitic grammar: synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–28.
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following webpage: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe.php?id=826

• 2002. The universal syntax of semantic primes in Mandarin Chinese. In Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.) Meaning and universal grammar – Theory and empirical findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, vol. 1: pp. 243–322.

• 2006(a). From Eurocentrism to Sinocentrism: the case of disposal constructions in Sinitic languages. In Felix Ameka, Alan Dench and Nicholas Evans (eds.) Catching language: the standing challenge of grammar writing. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 441-486.
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following website: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00180702/en/

• 2006(b). The diachronic syntax of causative structures in Early Modern Southern Min. In Dah-an Ho (ed.) Festschrift for Ting Pang-Hsin. Taipei: Academia Sinica, 973-1011. (with Alain Peyraube)
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following website: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00180707/en/

• 2007. Chinese linguistics and typology: the state of the art. Linguistic Typology 11.1: 187-211.  (with Li Ming and Alain Peyraube)

• 2007. 早期近代闽南话分析型致使结构的历史探讨 Zaoqi jindai Minnanhua fenxixing zhishi jiegou de lishi tantao [An historical exploration of analytical causatives in Early Southern Min]. Fangyan方言 ( Chinese dialects). (with Alain Peyraube), 1: 52-59.
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following website: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00180712/en/

• 2007. Hànyŭ fāngyán de chùzhì biāojì de lèixíng 《汉语方言的处置标记的类型》 [A typology of object-marking constructions : a pan-Sinitic view]. Yŭyánxué Lùncóng 《语言学论丛》(Anthology of Chinese linguistics) 36: 183-209
  A pre-publication version of this article can be found at the following website: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00180719/en/

Curriculum vitae

曹茜蕾简历 (in Chinese)

Hilary Chappell is currently Chair Professor in Linguistic Typology of East Asian

Languages at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, an appointment she took up in 2005 after teaching in the Linguistics Department at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia for 18 years. She has also served as the Director of the research centre, Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale (CRLAO), and its Deputy Director from 2006-2008.

She was originally awarded her doctoral degree in 1984 by the Australian National University in Canberra for her thesis entitled “A semantic analysis of passive, causative and dative constructions in standard Chinese” (ca. 500 pp.), spending one year of her doctoral candidature at Peking University in 1980-1981 where she was privileged to be the student of both Professors Zhu Dexi 朱德 熙 and Lu Jianming 陸儉明.

Following her doctoral work, she held postdoctoral fellowships with both the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany (University of Cologne 1985–86) and the Fulbright Scheme in the USA (University of Southern California and University of California at Santa Barbara 1987–88) . She has also been the recipient of a senior scholar award from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation (1999).

Since the early 1990s, Hilary Chappell has been engaged with other researchers in Chinese linguistics, in opening up the new domain of typology and the comparative grammatical description of Sinitic languages (or ‘Chinese dialects’), with the aim of gauging the extent of their diversity.

Her research has attempted to transcend the many theoretically solid linguistic descriptions now available for individual Chinese dialects by going one step further in taking a macroscopic or bird’s-eye view of Sinitic languages to analyse their shared and distinct features, in terms of major syntactic construction types. A corpus of discourse materials collected and transcribed over the past 10 years is used along with elicitation work as a basis for these syntactic analyses and similarly represents an innovative aspect to this research.

As part of this research project on the typology of Chinese languages, she organized the First International Symposium on Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on the Grammar of Sinitic Languages at the University of Melbourne in 1996, with 12 invited speakers from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, the USA and France. This subsequently served as the basis for the edited book, Sinitic grammar: Synchronic and diachronic perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2001, 429 pp).

Her earliest edited work with William McGregor on The grammar of inalienability. A typological perspective on body parts terms and the part-whole relation (Mouton de Gruyter 1996, 931 pp) similarly opened up new territory in the treatment of the coding of possession from a variety of different perspectives (syntax, morphology, lexicon etc) in a large number of language families. More recently, in co-authorship with Christine Lamarre, she published A grammar and lexicon of Hakka (EHESS, Paris, 2005) which includes an annotated translation of a German grammar and lexicon of Sin’on Hakka 新安 客家話, as spoken in Southwestern Guangdong province in the 19th century.

Building on the foundation of earlier research by both Chinese and western scholars, she has also carried out studies on variation in object-marking constructions; on the development of complementizers from verbs of saying and on markers of evidentiality, aspect and negation in Sinitic languages. Current work underway is on a monograph Typology of Chinese languages: morphosyntax and grammar for OUP while a future project with Dr Wu Yunji  伍云姬 is to write a grammar of the Waxiang language for which the first fieldwork trips have already been undertaken in northwest Hunan.

Scientific activities have also witnessed her active involvement:  Invited or keynote speaker at more than 20 conferences over the last 20 years, Prof. Chappell gave a course on the Typology of Sinitic languages at the Spring School of Linguistics held in March 2007 at the Ludwig-Maxmilians Universität in Munich, and organized by the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL) for the benefit of doctoral students from a large number of European countries. She has similarly been invited to present a 3-week course on the Typology of Sinitic languages at the Linguistics Society of America’s Summer School to be held in 2009at UC Berkeley.  Editorial responsabilities include the journal, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale (2005–), Journal of Chinese Linguistics (2000–) and Linguistic Typology (2001–2008).

She has been the principal organizer or member of the organizing committee for several conferences over the past 15 years. In September 2007, she organized a workshop on Marking paradoxes in transitivity at the 4th Annual Conference of the EACL held at the MPI, Leipzig, with Prof Rint Sybesma of the University of Leiden. This is the first workshop to explore the interesting paradox of Sinitic languages which code patients and agents (albeit in different construction types) with the same morphological marking. She will be one of the organizers of the next International Conference on Chinese languages and linguistics, IACL-17, to be held in Paris in 2009.

Prof. Chappell has supervised 24 graduate students in Australia, including 10 at doctoral level, before her move to France. Two of her most recent graduates have had their theses published as monographs with Mouton de Gruyter and John Benjamins, and most have since been employed in either research or university teaching positions in Australia and the USA.

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