Stephen Matthews

Stephen Matthews
B.A. (Cantab), M.A., Ph.D. (Southern Calif.)

Associate Professor

School of Humanities (Linguistics)

M124, Main Building,

The University of Hong Kong,

Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong.

Tel: 2859-2752 Fax: 2546-4943

Email: matthews at hku dot hk

Wikipedia Page

**Stephen Matthews is on leave from September 2009 to January 2010.**

Stephen Matthews 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. He is Co-Director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre. An amateur musician, he plays second violin with the Hong Kong Chamber Orchestra and the SAR Philharmonic.

Research projects:

Rethinking Cantonese grammar: typology processing and acquisition
Parsing principles and constituent order in Cantonese
The Min dialect of Chaozhou and comparative Chinese grammar
A Cantonese-English bilingual child language corpus (Principal Investigator: Virginia Yip)
Multimedia perspectives on bilingual development (Principal Investigator: Virginia Yip)
Towards a grammar of Chinese Pidgin English

Current courses:

Recent and forthcoming articles:

Francis, E. & S. Matthews. 2005. A multi-dimensional approach to the category 'verb' in Cantonese. Journal of Linguistics 41, 267-305.
Matthews, S., H. Xu & V. Yip. 2005. Passive and unaccusative in the Jieyang dialect of Chaozhou. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 14, 267-298.
Li, M, S. Matthews and G.P.S.Smith. 2005. Pidgin English texts from the Chinese English Instructor. In G.P.Smith & S. Matthews (eds), Chinese Pidgin English: Texts and Contexts. Special Issue of the Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics Vol. 10, no (September 2005), 79-167.
Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2005. Dual input and learnability: Null objects in Cantonese-English bilingual children. Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, ed. by James Cohen, Kara T. McAlister, Kellie Rostad and Jeff MacSwan. 2421-31. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Matthews, S. 2006. On serial verb constructions in Cantonese. In A.Y.Aikhenvald & R.M.W.Dixon (eds), Serial Verbs: a Cross-linguistic Typology. Oxford University Press. Pp 69-87.
Matthews, S. 2006. Cantonese Grammar in Areal Perspective. In A.Y.Aikhenvald & R.M.W.Dixon (eds), Grammars in Contact: a Cross-linguistic Typology. Oxford University Press. Pp 220-236.
Francis, E. & S. Matthews. 2006. Categoriality and object extraction in Cantonese serial verb constructions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 24: 751-801.
Yap, Foong Ha, Yumi Inoue, Yasuhiro Shirai, Stephen Matthews, Ying Wai Wong, & Yi Heng Chan. 2006. Aspectual asymmetries in Japanese: Evidence from a reaction time study. Japanese/Korean Linguistics, volume 14, pp. 113-124. Stanford, CSLI (Center for the Study of Language and Information).
Yip, V. & S. Matthews. 2007. Relative clauses in Cantonese-English bilingual children: typological challenges and processing motivations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 29: 277-300.
Yap, Foong Ha & Stephen Matthews. 2008. The development of East Asian nominalizers in East Asian and Tibeto-Burman languages. In Maria Jose Lopez-Couso and Elena Seone (eds.), in collaboration with Teresa Fanago. Rethinking Grammaticalization in the Twenty-First Century. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Earlier articles

Books:

Matthews, S. & V. Yip, . Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. (on-line review by Marjorie Chan) London: Routledge, 1994;

Japanese edition by E. Chishima and S. Kataoka, Tokyo: Toho Shoten, 2000;

Comrie, B., S. Matthews and M. Polinsky (consulting editors). The Atlas of Languages. New York: Facts on File, and London: Bloomsbury, 1996;

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, Paris: Editions Acropole, 2004;
Czech version: Atlas Jazyků, Prague: Metafora, 2007;

Matthews, S. (ed), Studies in Cantonese Linguistics. Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, 1998;
Yip, V. & S. Matthews, Basic Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. London: Routledge, 2000;
Yip, V. & S. Matthews, Intermediate Cantonese: a Grammar and Workbook. (on-line review by Blaine Erickson) London: Routledge, 2001;
Yip, V. & S. Matthews, The Bilingual Child: early development and language contact*. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
*Winner of the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award 2009:

"The Linguistic Society of America announces the 2009 recipient of the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award. The winning book is chosen by a three-member committee from among works submitted to the LSA for consideration. The award will be presented at the LSA's business meeting on January 9, 2009 in San Francisco, California.

The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact, by Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews, presents interesting new data and insightful analyses of bilingual development. Based on the most extensive bilingual corpus yet assembled and drawing on both generative and typological theoretical perspectives, the authors provide an extensive, informed and data-rich treatment of a difficult problem. The book sets a new standard for the study of childhood bilingualism, and shows how this study bears on many different areas of linguistics, including monolingual acquisition, language contact, syntactic theory, typology, and historical linguistics."

Theses supervised