East Asian Linguistics Project

Director

Chih-p’ing Chou

Executive Committee

Chih-p’ing Chou

Gwee-sook Kim

E. Perry Link

Seiichi Makino

 

The East Asian Linguistics Project grew out of the Chinese Linguistics Project, which came into being in 1966 with a Ford Foundation grant. Visiting scholars from both American and foreign institutions have come to take part in project activities. There has been a series of programs and working groups in pure and applied linguistics: (1) the Dialect Project, designed for a descriptive-comparative study of modern Chinese and Sino-Xenic dialects; (2) the Historical Linguistics Group, working on the phonological problems and reconstruction of ancient Chinese; (3) the Computer Count Project, established for a large-scale computer count and analysis of modern vernacular literary Chinese; and (4) the Teaching Materials Group, which is the present focus of the project, producing a series of pedagogical materials to upgrade Chinese language-teaching nationally and at all levels, elementary as well as the most advanced, and providing materials for aiding graduate research in original source materials. These materials include both classical and modern Chinese and are based on selections from literature as well as films and videotaped programs.