Wang Jialing (; November 28, 1934 – June 23, 2008) was a Chinese theoretical linguist specializing in

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

Education

Wang graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages at

Nankai University Nankai University (NKU or Nankai; ) is a national public research university located in Tianjin, China. It is a prestigious Chinese state Class A Double First Class University approved by the central government of China, and a member of the fo ...

in 1954.

Career

He started his career teaching at Tianjin #28 Middle School from 1954-1960. In 1960. Wand then joined the English Department (later Foreign Languages College) of

Tianjin Normal University Tianjin Normal University (TNU) () is a public research university founded in 1958 in Tianjin, China. In 2017–2018, Chinese University Alumni Association ( CUAA) ranks Tianjin Normal University 3rd in normal universities in north China. Histor ...

. In the early 1980s, when in his fifties, Wang started his interest in theoretical linguistics and particularly

generative phonology Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics ...

. In the following 20 years, he devoted himself to the introduction of phonological theories in Mainland China.Wee, Lian-Hee, 2008-6-23 Obituary of Professor Wang Jialing LINGUIST list. Retrieved 2014-11-26. He served as the editor of many major linguistics journals in Mainland China and he co-edited with Norval Smith the book (Mouton de Gruyter 1997). Wang's research applied phonological theories to the analysis of Chinese phonological phenomena. His main research was in phonology with a special focus on "neutral tone", i.e.

syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...

s without or losing lexical tone. At the time of his death, he was near the completion of his project on the analysis of neutral tones across Chinese dialects (National Social Science Foundation of China).

Books

* Wang, Jialing & Norval S.H. Smith (eds.) (1997) . Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. * Lu, Jilun & Jialing Wang (eds.) (2003) . Tianjin Shehui Kexue Yuan Press ianjin Social Sciences Academy Press (In Chinese)

Selected publications

* Wang, Jialing (1997) The representation of the neutral tone in Chinese Putonghua. In Wang, Jialing & Norval S.H. Smith (eds.) (1997) . Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 157-184. * Wang, Jialing (2002a) An OT analysis of neutral tone in three Chinese dialects. inguistic Sciences1.1:78–85. (In Chinese) * Wang, Jialing (2002b) OT and the Tone Sandhi and tone neutralization in Tianjin Dialect. tudies of the Chinese Language4.289:363–371. (In Chinese)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wang, Jialing 1934 births 2008 deaths Chinese phonologists Nankai University alumni