I would like to inform you about the upcoming guest lecture series on the rarely taught topic in our university, Variation across Chinese dialects by Pui Yiu Szeto (University of Hong Kong), who will be visiting us during the first week of October, thanks to our faculty’s funding for research visit. Pui Yiu has recently published an interesting article on the areal-linguistic and quantitative approach to the variation of Mandarin dialects:

Szeto, Pui Yiu, Ansaldo, Umberto, & Matthews, Stephen. (2018). Typological variation across Mandarin dialects: An areal perspective with a quantitative approach. Linguistic Typology 22(2). 233–275.

The preliminary date of the lectures series is set to be on 1, 3 and 5 October 2018, 10:00-12:00 and 14:00-16:00 (2 lectures per day). The lecture rooms will be informed later to those who have registered (see the link to registration form below). The event is open to everyone from BA and MA students to PhD students, Post-doc researchers and teaching staff!

Short description
This guest lecture series on variation across Chinese dialects deals with the variation of Sinitic languages from the perspective of language typology and contacts. The lecture series also discusses the relation between Sinitic languages and people by helps from the field of population genetics. No prior knowledge of Chinese is required.

By attending the lectures and writing a course work (5-8 pages) on the selected topic of interest, participants have a possibility to obtain 5 ECTS for the following study units (for example):
– Asian languages: Special Course
– LINGDA: Current Topics in General Linguistics
– Others (agreement with the responsible professors)

For our arrangement, if you are interested in coming to the lectures, please fill the form in the following link (https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/90467/lomake.html) so that we know how many of you are coming and how to adjust the contents of lectures to suit the audience. We will inform you who have registered through the aforementioned form about the exact time and venue of the lectures later during September.

In case of any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. Please also feel free to spread the news about this lecture series to your circles or other people who might be interested, too.

Best wishes,

Chingduang Yurayong
Co-ordinator
chingduang.yurayong@helsinki.fi

Pui Yiu Szeto
Lecturer
pyszeto@gmail.com
http://pyszeto.wixsite.com/home