• My name is pronounced [˧˥tʂʰən ˥tɕʰjəu˧˥ʂɻ̩] in Putonghua and [˨˩tsʰən ˦˥tɕʰjəu˨˩sɹ̩] in Southwestern Mandarin (my dialect). I am currently a second-year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut, and unavoidably an amateur Chinese-language poet.

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• A quote from W. H. Auden: “a poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

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• I am primarily a syntactician, but I consider most subfields of linguistics equally attractive and important. I am interested in syntactic theory and various kinds of interface studies. I also work on diachronic syntax.

• I enjoy encountering and investigating “new” languages. I am most familiar with the Sinitic languages (including premodern Chinese, Mandarin Chinese (a diverse language group), and other branches of the so-called Chinese dialects), the Japonic languages (Old, Early Middle, and Modern Japanese; one should learn Classical Japanese, for life is incomplete without reading Ichiyō Higuchi), and the Bantu languages.

• My latest CV can be viewed here.

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• Мечтатель? позвольте, да как не знать? я сама мечтатель!

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• It is difficult and perhaps also inappropriate to talk too much about oneself as a poet (to quote W. H. Auden again: “if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation I never answer ‘writer’ for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer ‘poetry’ would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry. The most satisfactory answer I have discovered, satisfactory because it withers curiosity, is to say ‘Medieval Historian’.”). Let the poems say -- most of them can be found on this website. Ignore them if you cannot properly read Chinese (or if you can, of course).

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