This project breaks the wall between syntax and phonetics and pioneers a syntax phonetics interface study of sentence-final particles (SFPs, henceforth) in Cantonese. SFPs have been a rather "subtle" but important aspect of Chinese dialectal grammar, which await comprehensive studies. The interface approach adopted in this project commence efforts in this filed. We will put forth a unified research framework for both SFPs and sentence-final intonation, i.e., to link up a syntactic analysis and prosodic feature identification, which should be the two sides of the same coin.

To limit the domain of research into a more manageable size, the scope of our study is restricted to the SFPs in Cantonese interrogatives, which will be put into a pool as the "core" data of this project.

Both the controlled phonetic experiment and the natural speech collection will be conducted in this research project to investigate the prosodic features of SFPs and the interactions between SFPs and sentence-final intonation. In the controlled phonetic experiment, the targeted SFPs are embedded in the sentence stimuli of the designed reading list, and a daily scene as the context will be provided to assist the participants more naturally produce the targeted sentences. In natural speech collection, two methods, "conversation through phone calling" and "face-to-face conversation" will be adopted to elicit daily natural conversations.

In addition to Hong Kong Cantonese, which is our main focus in this project, we would also like to start the first step of cross-dialectal grammar comparison. A smaller sample of participants from Guangzhou will be recruited to take the same set of experiments.

All the audio recordings collected will be compiled to a database of Cantonese SFPs, with careful descriptions of their syntactic and phonological/prosodic properties. A fine grained grammatical analysis will further be proposed to explain the reasons behind the complicated facts.

With combined methods of syntax and phonetics, the interface study in this project will result in a more thorough picture of SFPs. Not only qualitative analyses, but also quantitative analyses will be conducted. A long-term impact of this project can be expected on fine-tuning the knowledge of Chinese grammar and comparative grammar. In addition, the results of this project can be further applied to practical use. The prosody of SFPs is a very important factor to the naturalness of speech. With more prosodic features identified in this project, we can enhance the naturalness of speech synthesis as well as language learning.

Exile to Manchuria in early Qing times—mainly in the second half of the seventeenth century after the Ming-Qing dynastic changeover—is a peculiar historical and political phenomenon whose scale and scope is unprecedented in pre-modern Chinese history. Among the exiles were some very accomplished writers who continued to write in the places of banishment, and their treatment of the trope of exile and exilic experiences in poems and prose writings is worthy of serious study.

This project is conceived as a critical study of the exilic writings of the especially important yet understudied poet Fang Xiaobiao方孝標 (1618-?), who, in the wake of the Examination Scandal of 1657, was exiled with his entire family to Ningguta寧古塔in Heilongjiang, a remote town close to the borders of Chosen Korea. The Fang family spent three years in Ningguta until late 1661 when they bought their freedom with fiscal donations to public works projects. They returned impoverished to China, depended upon the mercy of others and led a miserable life. I wish to look at “the question of exile,” attempt to answer questions about exilic condition, and to explore the poetics and aesthetics of exile. The project is primarily a literary and cultural study.

Source materials of various kinds will be used: collections of poetry and prose writings, historical records, memoirs, journals, etc. Given the fact that the question and condition of exile is prominently foregrounded in Fang Xiaobiao’s Dunzhai shixuan鈍齋詩選, this collection of poetry will be the focus of this study. I will also contextualize Fang Xiaobiao’s writings with those of his co-exiles such as his father Fang Gongqian方拱乾 (1596-1666) and the famous poet Wu Zhaoqian吳兆騫 (1631-1684). It is rewarding to read their poems side by side because many of them were written during the same period of time and were based on shared experiences.

The results of this project will contribute substantially to a long-term research project, “Exile and Early Qing Literature,” that I have been working on. “Exile and Early Qing Literature” is a topic that will significantly enrich our knowledge and understanding of Qing literature and culture, and it also has significance for understanding such modern and contemporary experiences as human dislocation, psychic rupture and traumatic loss.

Wang Niansun and Wang Yinzhi are both famous Qing scholars known for their studies in ancient Chinese texts. In Dushu zazhi (《讀書雜志》, Miscellaneous Reading Notes) and Jinyi shuwen (《經義述聞》, Accounts on Interpretations of the Classics), these two scholars document their discoveries in explaining the dubious meanings of the classics and in annotating the received interpretations of historical and philosophical texts. Their researches on pre-Qin, Qin and Han ancient texts have been widely acknowledged and used by scholars till this day. However, due to the constraint of research materials, even though scholarly interest in this topic has grown since 2010, little study about the two Wangs’ unpublished works exists. To explore the two Wang’s manuscripts and the critical editions of the ancient titles they studied, this project proposes to collect, study, and publish as soon as possible the newly discovered collated edition of Xunzi (《荀子》) and Jingyi shuwen manuscripts.

Thus far, the large number of new materials studied in this project mostly remain unpublished. Wang Niansun made more than a thousand emendations and notes in Xunzi edition, however, half of the collations are not included in Dushu zazhi. The thirty-four volumes of the Jingyi shuwen manuscripts also include numerous commentaries and corrections by the two Wangs. This project proposes to compile and publish these materials in the form of a book entitled Ziliao huibian (《資料彙編》, A Collection of Materials). Through close-reading and careful analysis, this project contrasts the two Wangs’ manuscripts with their relevant publications. This project is an attempt to investigate the value of Wang Niansun’s works in Xunzi studies, the process of Wang Yinzhi’s production of Jingyi shuwen, the differences between various editions of Jingyi shuwen, as well as the changes of the two Wangs’ elaborations of Confucius Classics. Efforts will also be made to tackle the issue of authorship between the two Wangs in the context of intellectual history. To facilitate further studies on the two Wangs, these outputs will be uploaded to the project’s website for easy access.