Moira Yip

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Moira Yip (b. 1949 [1] ) is a British-American linguist.

Contents

Biography

She earned her PhD in Linguistics in 1980 at MIT as a student of Morris Halle. [2] She retired from her position as Professor of Linguistics at University College London (UCL) in 2009. [3] While at UCL she also was co-director of the Centre for Human Communication [4] and Pro-Provost for China. [5] [6] Before taking up the position at UCL in 1999, she was Professor of Linguistics and Acting Dean at the University of California-Irvine (1992-1999) and Associate Professor at Brandeis University (1982-1992).

Moira Yip worked on a wide range of issues in theoretical phonology, and particularly on the phonology of Chinese. Her publications include papers on reduplication, morpho-phonology, prosodic phonology, and feature theory. Her frequently cited dissertation on the Tonal phonology of Chinese was published in the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series (Garland). [7] In 2002 she published the first modern textbook on tone in the Cambridge University Press linguistics textbook series. Her 1988 journal article on the Obligatory Contour Principle was important in extending the understanding and application of this principle in pre-Optimality Theory phonology. [8]

She is married to business academic George Yip. Since 2017 she has authored a wildlife blog, https://eyesonthewild.blog.

Key publications

Related Research Articles

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.

Tone sandhi is a phonological change that occurs in tonal languages. It involves changes to the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes, based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. This change typically simplifies a bidirectional tone into a one-directional tone. Tone sandhi is a type of sandhi, which refers to fusional changes, and is derived from the Sanskrit word for "joining."

Taishanese, alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisan-wa, is a Yue Chinese dialect native to Taishan, Guangdong. Although related, Taishanese has little mutual intelligibility with Cantonese. Taishanese is also spoken throughout Sze Yup, located on the western fringe of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong China. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, most of the Chinese emigration to North America originated from Sze Yup. Thus, up to the mid-20th century, Taishanese was the dominant variety of the Chinese language spoken in Chinatowns in Canada and the United States. It was formerly the lingua franca of the overseas Chinese residing in the United States.

A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch rather than by loudness or length, as in some other languages like English. Pitch-accent also contrasts with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Standard Chinese, in which practically every syllable can have an independent tone. Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.

The Obligatory Contour Principle is a hypothesis in autosegmental phonology that states that (certain) consecutive identical features are banned in underlying representations. The OCP is most frequently cited when discussing the tones of tonal languages, but it has also been applied to other aspects of phonology.

In linguistics, upstep is a phonemic or phonetic upward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. It is best known in the tonal languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. Upstep is a much rarer phenomenon than its counterpart, downstep.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trique languages</span> Language family

The Triqui, or Trique, languages are a family of Oto-Manguean spoken by 30,000 Trique people of the Mexican states of Oaxaca and the state of Baja California in 2007. They are also spoken by 5,000 immigrants to the United States. Triqui languages belong to the Mixtecan branch together with the Mixtec languages and Cuicatec.

David Arnold Odden is professor emeritus of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His contributions to linguistics have been in the area of phonology and language description, most notably African tone and the description of Bantu languages. In addition, his work on the obligatory contour principle (OCP) has been instrumental to an understanding of that phenomenon. He is the former editor of Studies in African Linguistics and a current editorial board member of Natural Language and Linguistic Theories.

Cantonese changed tones occur when a word's tone becomes a different tone due to a particular context or meaning. A "changed" tone is the tone of the word when it is read in a particular lexical or grammatical context, while the base tone is usually the tone of the word when read in citation. It is thus distinct from tone sandhi, which are automatic modifications of tone created by their phonetic environment, without regard to meaning. In its most common form, it occurs on the final syllable of either a compound word, a reduplicated word, or certain vocative examples, especially in direct address to people such as family members. There are a limited set of semantic domains where changed tone occurs, generally associated with small things, familiarity, food and disease.

Hashimoto Mantarō was a Japanese sinologist and linguist who is best known for advocating research on language geography, linguistic typology, and how different areal features in the varieties of Chinese reflect contact with other language families.

Zhù Huá (祝华), is Professor of Language Learning and Intercultural Communication at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London, and Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics. She was previously Chair of Educational Linguistics in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, and Professor of Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was a member of the Education subpanel of the 2021 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), member of the 2020 Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise, and chairs the grant assessment panel for language and linguistics for the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. She is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK, and the International Academy for Intercultural Research https://www.intercultural-academy.net/.

Donca Steriade is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Sandler</span> American-Israeli linguist

Wendy Sandler is an American-Israeli linguist who is known for her research on the phonology of Sign Languages.

Ellen M. Kaisse is an American linguist. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Washington (USA), best known for her research on the interface between phonology, syntax and morphology.

Sara Elizabeth Mole Crowley is a Professor of Molecular Cell Biology and Provost's Envoy for Gender Equality at University College London and the Great Ormond Street Hospital. She works on diseases caused by genetic changes, in particular neurodegenerative diseases that impact children.

Diana B. Archangeli is an American linguist and Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona.

Elizabeth Cook Zsiga is a linguist whose work focuses on phonology and phonetics. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University.

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Alfred (“Al”) D. Mtenje is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Malawi. He is known for his work on the prosody of Malawian Bantu languages, as well as for his work in support of language policies promoting the native languages of Malawi.

Yiya Chen is a linguist and phonetician specializing in speech prosody. She is professor of phonetics at Leiden University as well as senior researcher at the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition.

References

  1. ↑ "Professor Moira Jean YIP MA PhD". www.clement-jones.com. Retrieved 2022-08-15.
  2. ↑ Yip, Moira Jean (1980). Moira Yip dissertation (Thesis). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/15971.
  3. ↑ "Iris View Profile". iris.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  4. ↑ "Read My Lips: UCL Launches Centre for Human Communication". www.ucl.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2016-04-13. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  5. ↑ "New Pro-Provost for China, Hong Kong and Macao". www.ucl.ac.uk. 2 October 2006. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
  6. ↑ "Moira Yip: taking the lid off China". www.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-08-12.
  7. ↑ Yip, Moira (1990). The tonal phonology of Chinese. Outstanding dissertations in linguistics. New York London: Garland. ISBN   978-0-8153-0154-7.
  8. ↑ "moira yip - Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2017-07-19.
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