LEE Hun Tak Thomas

Emeritus Professor

BA (Swarthmore Coll.); MA (HKU); PhD (UCLA)

Phone: -

Email: huntaklee[at]cuhk.edu.hk

Director, Language Acquisition Laboratory

Prof. Thomas Lee received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from UCLA. His research interests lie in language acquisition and syntax/semantics, with particular reference to issues of learnability and the first language acquisition of Cantonese and Mandarin. His publications have focused on children's understanding and use of logical structures, and their implications for language and cognitive development. Prof. Lee led the construction of the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus (CANCORP) and the Chinese Early Language Acquisition (CELA) corpus. He is on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Contemporary Linguistics, Journal of East Asian Linguistics, and Language Acquisition.

Language acquisition; Syntax and semantics

My interests lie in the logical problem of language acquisition and syntactic/semantic acquisition, with special reference to Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking children. My recent research has been on quantifier scope in Chinese datives, Cantonese A-quantifiers, and syntactic change in Cantonese. Below are topics I have worked on:

(a) The acquisition of quantifier scope in Mandarin-speaking children, examining children's knowledge of the isomorphic principle in the mapping between logical form and syntax, and how that knowledge may be constrained by locality principles, quantifier type, and the thematic hierarchy;

(b) The development of linguistic knowledge in Mandarin-speaking children in the transition from babbling to syntax, focusing on issues such as lexical spurt, the onset of syntactic categories, word order and argument structure; the development of preschoolers’ competence with respect to classifiers and nominal structure, A-quantifiers and negation;

(c) Syntactic and semantic development in Cantonese preschoolers, with respect to word order and argument structure, questions, pro-drop, sentence final particles, nominal structure and referentiality, additive/restrictive focus, and A-quantifiers;

(d) The relationship between language acquisition and language change, as seen from ongoing changes in the structure of the noun phrase in modern-day Hong Kong Cantonese.

A large part of my work is based on longitudinal child language data. Along with other colleagues based in Hong Kong Polytechnic University and University of Hong Kong (Colleen Wong and Sam Leung), I developed the Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus (CANCORP). Collaborating with researchers in China (Yang Xiaolu of Tsing Hua University and the late Professor Fang Li of Beijing Language and Culture University), I have built a Chinese Early Language Acquisition (CELA) corpus of children in Beijing, Changsha and Hong Kong, investigating how Chinese children acquire the core properties of the target languages from infancy to two years of age.

LING2001 Linguistics Argumentation I
LING2002 Linguistics Argumentation II
LING2006 Semantics
LING3201 First Language Acquisition
LING6920 Topics in Language Acquisition