Stephen Matthews
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Stephen Matthews, a linguist and typologist, specialises in language typology, syntax and semantics. His current interests include the word order typology of Chinese; the grammar of Chinese dialects, notably Cantonese, Chaozhou and other Minnan dialects; language contact and bilingualism, with particular reference to Sinitic languages. Matthews is currently Acting Head of the new School of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong which incorporates the Departments of Linguistics, Philosophy, History, Comparative Literature, Fine Arts and Music.
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[edit] Biography
Matthews received his BA in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Cambridge, and his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. He has taught at the University of Hong Kong, the University of Melbourne and University of Paris. He has co-authored Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar (1994) and other works on Cantonese, and co-edited The Atlas of Languages with Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky (1996). His work has appeared in the Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Linguistic Typology and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. He is also an amateur musician, he plays the violin with the Hong Kong Chamber Orchestraand the SAR Philharmonic .He also has a son called Timothy Matthews who attends King George V School in Hong Kong.
[edit] The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus
The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, which is reported in 2005 as the world's largest video-linked database of children becoming bilingual, created by Matthews from The University of Hong Kong, and his wife, Professor Virginia Yip of The Chinese University of Hong Kong — features 170 hours of audio and video files of four families raising their children bilingually in Cantonese and English. The project, which includes transcripts and searchable video and audio segments, took 10 years to compile.
The database is accessible at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu , the Language Data Exchange System website of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, US, and has proved to be a useful study resource for researchers in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science around the world.
This database has already been the data source for several undergraduate and graduate dissertations in Hong Kong, and it is the basis of a book written by Yip and Matthews to be published by Cambridge University Press. The database focuses on children who are bilingual in English and Cantonese and who learned to speak two languages through the one-parent, one-language approach. Using that method, one parent speaks to the child in one language, and the other parent speaks to the child in another.
The project has been reported by Research Frontiers: Newsletter of Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, Article in The University of Hong Kong's BULLETIN and Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Media Relations.
[edit] Research Projects
- Parsing principles and constituent order in Cantonese
- The Min dialect of Chaozhou and comparative Chinese grammar
- Cantonese in context: syntactic aspects of areal typology
- Multimedia perspectives on bilingual development
- A Cantonese-English bilingual child language corpus
- Towards a grammar of Chinese Pidgin English
[edit] Books & Publication
- Matthews, S. & V.Yip. 1994. Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge. (on-line review by Marjorie Chan); Japanese edition by E. Chishima and S. Kataoka, Tokyo: Toho Shoten, 2000.
- Comrie, B., S.Matthews and M. Polinsky (consulting editors).1996. The Atlas of Languages. New York: Facts on File, and London: Bloomsbury
- Dutch version edited by Jeroen Wiedenhof: De grote taalatlas. Amsterdam: De Schuyt & Co., 1998;
- Japanese version edited by Fusa Katada: Sekai gengo bunka zukan: sekai no gengo no kigen to denpa. Tokyo: Tooyoo Shorin, 1999;
- Revised English edition: New York: Facts on File, 2003;
- French version based on revised edition: Atlas des langues, Editions Acropole, Paris, 2004
- Matthews, S. (ed), 1998. Studies in Cantonese Linguistics. Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.
- Yip, V. & S. Matthews, 2000. Basic Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge.
- Yip, V. & S. Matthews, 2001. Intermediate Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge. (on-line review by Blaine Erickson)
- Yip, V. & S. Matthews. Forthcoming. The Bilingual Child: early development and language contact. Cambridge University Press.
