top of page

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

  • 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.

  • 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).

CONTACT

Department of Linguistics

365 Fairfield Way, Oak Hall, Unit 1145

Storrs, CT, 06269-1145

Email: qiushi.chen@uconn.edu

bottom of page