William Shi-Yuan Wang (; born August 14, 1933) is a Chinese 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 and National Taiwan Normal University, Emeritus Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, and Academician of Academia Sinica.
Early life William Shi-Yuan Wang was born in 1933 in Shanghai, China, and spent his preschool years in Anhui. His early schooling was in Shanghai.
Education Wang attended Columbia College in New York City on a scholarship (1951-1955) earning a BA in Liberal Arts. He pursued graduate work in Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where he received his MA in 1956, and his PhD in 1960, working with Gordon E. Peterson. His dissertation was entitled Phonemic Theory A (with Application To Midwestern English).
Academic career Sinitic languages 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,W.S-Y. Wang. 1963. Mandarin phonology. Project on Linguistic Analysis Report 6.1-6. Ohio State University Research Foundation. tones,Wang, W.S-Y. & Kung-Pu Li. 1967. Tone 3 in Pekinese. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 10.3. 629-36.Wang, W.S-Y. 1967. Phonological features of tone. International Journal of American Linguistics 33.2.93-105. syntax,Wang, W.S-Y. 1964. Some syntactic rules for Mandarin. Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists 191-202, Mouton.Wang, W.S-Y. 1965. Two aspect markers in Mandarin. Language 41.3.457-70.Wang, W.S-Y. 1967. Conjoining and deletion in Mandarin syntax. Monumenta Serica 26.224-36. as well as overviews of Chinese languages,Wang, W. S.-Y. (1973). The Chinese language. Scientific American, 228, 50–60. and tone languages generally.Wang, W. S. (1972). The many uses of F0. Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics Dedicated to the Memory of Pierre Delattre. The Hague: Mouton, 487–503.Wang, W. S.-Y. (1991). Tone languages. The Linguistic Encyclopedia. Routledge, London, 1455–1470.
In addition to his research contributions, he was elected as the first president of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (founded in 1992). 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.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics Wang founded the Journal of Chinese Linguistics (; ) 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.
Database of Chinese dialects In 1966, Wang created the first electronic database of Chinese dialects, known as the Dictionary on Computer (DOC).Cheng, C.-C. (1994). DOC: lts Birth and Life. IN HONOR OF WILLIAM S- Y. WANG: INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES ON LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE CHANGE. M. Y. Chen and O. J. L. Tzeng. Taipei, Pyramid Press 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.Chen, Matthew. 1972 "Nasals and Nasalization in Chinese: Explorations in Phonological Universals." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California
Lexical diffusion
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,”Cheng, Chin-Chuan, and William S-Y. Wang. "Tone change in Chao-zhou Chinese: A study in lexical diffusion." The lexicon in phonological change (1977): 86-100. 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.Wang, W. S.-Y. (1979). Language Change—A Lexical Perspective. Annual Review Of Anthropology, 8, 353–371.Ogura, M.; Wang, W.S.-Y.. 2011, Evolution theory and lexical diffusion, In: Advances in English Historical Linguistics. pp. 315-334 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.
General perspective on language 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. 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.
Evolution of language Wang is one of the pioneers in modeling language emergence, evolution, and vitality. Early summaries of his views on language change and evolution were published in 1976: "Language change", 1978: "The three scales of diachrony"Wang, WS-Y. "The three scales of diachrony." Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Urbana, Ill 8.2 (1978): 63-75. and 1982: "Explorations in language evolution."Wang, W. S.-Y. (1982). Explorations in language evolution. Osmania Papers in Linguistics, 8(Supplement), 1–49. 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. 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, 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. Syntax demonstrates the mosaic nature of evolutionary change, in that it made use of (and led to the enhancement of) numerous preexisting neurocognitive features. It is best understood as an emergent characteristic of the explosion of semantic complexity that occurred during hominid evolution.Schoenemann, P. T., & Wang, W. S.-Y. (1996). Evolutionary principles and the emergence of syntax. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19(4), 646–647.
Wang guest-edited a special issue on language evolution in 1991 in Scientific American.Wang, W. S.-Y. (Ed.). (1991). The emergence of language: Development and evolution: Readings from “Scientific American” magazine. (pp. xiv, 182). W H Freeman/Times Books/ Henry Holt & Co. He and his students/collaborators have published their work of modeling language change and evolution in venues such as Trends in Ecology and Evolution (2005), Transactions of the Philological Society (2005), Language and Linguistics (2005),Gong, T. and W.S-Y. Wang. 2005. Computational modeling on language emergence: a coevolution model of lexicon, syntax and social structure. Language and Linguistics 6.1.1-42. Lingua (2008), in addition to various other Chinese language journals.Wang, W.S-Y. and J.Y. Ke. 2001. 王士元, 柯津云. 語言的起源及建模仿真初探. 中國語文 282.195-200. [A preliminary study on language emergence and simulation modeling.] He has also recognized the value of computational explorations of language evolution.Wang, W. S.-Y., J.-Y. Ke, and J. W. Minett. 2004. ‘Computer modeling of language evolution’ in C.-R. Huang and W. Lenders (eds): Computer Linguistics and Beyond: Perspectives at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Taipei: Language and Linguistics, Academia Sinica A lecture given by Wang in Singapore in March 2014 titled "Language Evolution & Some Phase Transitions," which discusses his recent views on language evolution is available on YouTube.
Wang has also collaborated with scholars outside linguistics, including John Holland, who was best known for his work on complex systems approaches and pioneering the use of genetic algorithms and learning classifier systems in computational simulations. In 2005, both Wang and Holland were co-authors with several others on a paper exploring computational simulations of the evolution of the lexicon and syntax. Wang also collaborated with Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the geneticist who, among other things, pioneered the study of the extent to which findings in genetic linguistics are consistent with current hypotheses in genetics regarding the dispersal of the human species around the world since the exodus out of Africa. In 1986 Wang and Cavalli-Sforza co-authored a paper showing a strong correlation between geographic distance and lexical difference among Micronesian languages.Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Wang, W. S. Y. (1986). Spatial distance and lexical replacement. Language, 38–55.