William Shi-Yuan Wang

William Shi-Yuan Wang (Chinese: 王士元; born 1933) is a linguist, with expertise in phonology, the history of Chinese language and culture, historical linguistics, and the evolution of language in humans.

He is Chair Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Emeritus Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, and Academician of Academia Sinica.

William Shi-Yuan Wang was born in 1933 in Shanghai, China, and spent his preschool years in Anhui.

His early schooling was in Shanghai.

Wang attended Columbia College in New York City on a scholarship (1951-1955) earning a B.A. in Liberal Arts.

He pursued graduate work in Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where he received his M.A. in 1956, and his Ph.D. in 1960, working with Gordon E. Peterson.

His dissertation, "Phonemic Theory A (with Application To Midwestern English)"

Wang has made contributions to the genetic classification of Sinitic languages and their typological peculiarities, including the study of its tones.

He has published on Chinese phonology, tones, syntax, as well as overviews of Chinese languages, and tone languages generally.

In 1966 Wang created the first electronic database of Chinese dialects, known as the Dictionary on Computer (DOC).

DOC started as a basic corpus of 2,444 morphemes, each corresponding to a single Chinese logograph (ideograph).

Each of these was referenced by a unique four-digit number assigned by the telegraphic service in China.

The pronunciation(s) for each morpheme was given in each of 23 Chinese dialects or sources spanning 14 centuries, totaling 58,012 entries.

It has since been expanded to include materials from important Middle and Modern Chinese dictionaries and rhyme books, as well as pronunciations of Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and different Chinese dialects.

This database formed the basis for several studies of language change, including: 1) the first quantitative study of reflexes of the syllable initials in sixth-century Chinese, a study of the historical processes of nasalization and denasalization.

The Dictionary on Computer formed the basis for Wang's theory of language change known as Lexical diffusion.

An important early paper outlining this theory was "Competing Changes as a Cause of Residue" published in the journal Language.

In an article titled “Tone change in Chaozhou Chinese: A study in lexical diffusion,” he disputed the Neogrammarian assumption of “sound laws” in the ways that the phonetic inventories of languages evolve, with the changes putatively applying swiftly and across the board to classes of sounds.

Consistent with his later position that grammars leak, he pointed out exceptions to sound classes in the spread of changes.

He argued that sound changes affect one word at a time, spreading gradually to other lexical items that have the same sounds (in similar phonological environment) when they get to be used, subject to the usage frequencies of the lexical items in which they occur and the analogies established by speakers.

Words that are less frequently used or joined the lexicon at a different times may not undergo the change.

He has refined his position in several other papers.

As a measure of the importance of this idea, a search for "lexical diffusion" on scholar.google.com on February 24, 2021, yielded over 5,380 results.

Wang has long believed there has been an excessive emphasis in Linguistics on strict formalisms.

He has credited the linguist Joseph Greenberg with being an important influence in this regard.

Early summaries of his views on language change and evolution were published in 1976: "Language change", 1978: "The three scales of diachrony" and 1982: "Explorations in language evolution."

In 1984 he published a commentary critiquing Bickerton's "Language Bioprogram Hypothesis" target article in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, arguing against the Chomskian perspective that language was largely independent of other aspects of cognition:"'...the fact that language involves biological equipment does not necessarily lead to the 'highly modular task-specific cognitive devices' and 'equally modular and task-specific processing component' that Bickerton advocates. A piece of equipment may be involved in a certain task, but it may be used for other tasks as well, without being specific to any particular one of them. The devices used in language are surely involved in the more global (and evolutionarily prior) tasks of cognition, memory, and perception. Our goal is to elucidate how these general purpose devices interact with the specific requirements of learning and using language.

In addition to his research contributions, he was elected as the first president of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (founded in 1992).

To posit anything specific to language, in the sense that it serves no other non- linguistic function, seems to me not called for at this point'"In 1996 Prof. Wang co-authored another commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences arguing that syntax was not likely an independent cognitive module:"'The belief that syntax is an innate, autonomous, species-specific module is highly questionable.

In an interview in 2010, he stated that he met informally many times with Joseph Greenberg when both were in the Bay Area in California (Greenberg at Stanford University and Wang at the University of California, Berkeley).

Wang related Greenberg's response to being shown a formal pattern of tone sandhi changes that Wang had discovered in Min Chinese dialects: "'He says “you’ve shown me a clever trick with a formalism, what do I learn about the nature of language, what do I learn about the nature of Min with this clever trick?” and I went home frustrated, and thought and thought and thought, and I realized how extremely right he was. How excessive abstraction, excessive formalism, removing us from the empirical foundations of language is leading linguistics down the wrong track.'"

Wang is one of the pioneers in modeling language emergence, evolution, and vitality.

He co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics with Chaofen Sun in 2015.

He is credited with founding the Department of East Asian languages in addition to the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University.

Wang founded the Journal of Chinese Linguistics 中国语言学报 (ISSN 0091-3723) in 1973.

He has edited the journal since its foundation.

He is currently Honorary Editor.

The journal has published peer-reviewed articles covering many aspects of the Chinese language, including its phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, grammar, semantics, pragmatics, and Chinese writing systems.

It has also published papers on historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, languages in contact, language change, language families.

The Journal also publishes a monograph series.