李行德（香港中文大學/天津師範大學教授）
08/11/20 19:20
Remembering Professor Tang Ting-Chi（1931-2020）
Thomas Hun-tak Lee
It was with great sadness that many of us in the field of Chinese linguistics learned of the passing away of Professor Ting-Chi Charles Tang, a distinguished generative linguist who dedicated his entire career to the integration of generative theory with the study of Chinese, the nativization of formal linguistics in the Chinese-speaking world, and the education of several generations of linguists in Taiwan.
A native of Miaoli, Taiwan, Professor Tang received his undergraduate education at National Taiwan University (NTU), majoring in law. He worked at Hsinchu high school for some years before enrolling at the Linguistics Department of the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1960s, then a major center of generative research. The faculty of U T Austin boasted of eminent scholars such as Archibald Hill, Emmon Bach, Carlota Smith and Rudolph Troike. Professor Tang did his master’s studies there during 1963-1964, later returning in the years 1971-1972 to complete his doctoral degree with a dissertation entitled “A case grammar of spoken Chinese”. Professor Tang taught at several national universities in Taiwan in his long teaching career, including Tsing Hua University (as a founding member of the Graduate Institute of Linguistics), Taiwan Normal University, Yuan Ze University, Soochow University and Fu Jen University.
A prolific scholar, Professor Tang has published more than 40 monographs and collected works, spanning the areas of Chinese syntax and morphology, comparative analysis of Chinese, English and Japanese, English grammar, as well as the grammar of Taiwanese. His writings have contributed seminal results on a number of topics, laying the essential groundwork for further exploration by later scholars. For his outstanding achievements in the field, Professor Tang received many prestigious awards, notably the Distinguished Researcher Award of the National Science Council, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Linguistic Association of Taiwan, the Six Arts Medal of the Ministry of Education, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Association of English Language Teachers.
I first met Professor Tang in 1981 as a second-year student on the MA program in Language Studies at the University of Hong Kong, a program based at the Language Center of HKU headed by Professors Robert Lord and Benjamin Tsou. I had the good fortune of attending some of Professor Tang’s lectures and had in-depth discussions with him, in which he would share his sharp insights and no-nonsense views about scholarship, freely and generously. In subsequent years, I wrote him periodically to seek his advice on various scholastic issues, and each time he would kindly reply in considerable detail in his elegant calligraphy. Throughout the 1990s, I had several opportunities of attending his talks at conferences and workshops in the US and Taiwan, and visiting him in Hsinchu. In 1991, colleagues and I at the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong invited Professor Tang to give a keynote lecture at a Conference on the Teaching of Linguistics in Chinese Communities, held at Hong Kong Baptist University. While Professor Tang did not make it in the end for personal reasons, he contributed a paper to the conference, on the indigenization of linguistics in Chinese-speaking communities, later published as Tang (1992a).
While my knowledge of Professor Tang’s multi-faceted scholarship is necessarily limited, I have been carrying around more than half a dozen of his book in my personal library wherever I set up base, be it Hong Kong, Changsha or Tianjin. For me these volumes contain gems of ideas which I found useful to consult repeatedly and also for introducing to students. Professor Tang’s 1972 dissertation represents one of the two major efforts to describe the structure of Chinese within the framework of Fillmore’s case grammar (the other being Li (1971)). It was an innovative proposal to analyze Chinese as a verb-initial language, parallel to similar analyses of English (McCawley 1970). The arguments for a verb-initial analysis of Chinese were based on typological generalizations, direction of gapping, and theory-internal considerations such as simplicity and economy, which can be attained if a subjectivization transformation was postulated. In this dissertation can be found various early formulations which were further developed by Professor Tang in later years and taken up by other scholars. Professor Tang proposed a main verb analysis of Chinese auxiliaries, which he thought was necessitated by the axiom of one negator per clause (cf. the analysis of Lin and Tang (1995) along similar lines). In this dissertation also we found discussion of the important issue of whether you “have” before a NP in Chinese should be regarded as an existential verb or a determiner, with Professor Tang advocating the former position，an issue probed in further depth in Huang (1988) and Tsai (2003).
Several other syntactic analyses proposed in the dissertation are noteworthy: his analysis of negation, questions, and relative clauses. On the analysis of interrogatives, he drew attention to important differences in presupposition and interrogative force between the sentence final particle questions on the one hand, and the A-not-A and wh-questions on the other: only the latter bear a +int feature in his analysis. Professor Tang was the first to observe minimality effects in the placement of the negator, observing that the negator needs to attach to the first [+verb] element in the sentence, based on the highly marked status of sentences such as Ta zai jiali bu chi fan (“s/he-at-home-not-eat-rice” compared with Ta bu zai jiali chifan (“s/he-not-at-home-eat-rice”) (Tang 1972:40). He was also the first to observe intervention effects in A-not-A questions, pointing to the ungrammaticality of an A-not-A operation on a VP modified by an adverb as in *Ta keneng hui bu hui lai (“s/he probably will not will come”). His early insights on Chinese interrogative structure were expounded in his monograph-length papers published as Tang (1988a, 1988b), which predated more recent analyses of constraints on A-not-A questions (cf. Law 2006). In his dissertation also we found an early discussion of the restrictive vs non-restrictive distinction in Chinese relative clauses (following Chao 1968; around the same time as Hashimoto 1971), in which Professor Tang observed restrictions on ordering, such as the unacceptability of having the relative clause precede “Det-CL-N” when the classifier related phrase is a universal quantifier. Professor Tang pursued this issue in greater detail in Tang (1979a), a paper that paved way for later discussions (Huang 1982; Teng 1987; Lin 2003).
I should mention two other seminal papers of Professor Tang: one on the double object construction, and the other on cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in Chinese. Tang (1979b) provides the first detailed formal treatment of the double object construction, classifying it into four types based on the verbs appearing in it, each with distinctive thematic properties and movement possibilities with respect to dative alternation, passivization, topicalization and relativization. Professor Tang also made interesting observations on the direction of transfer signaled by the verb (e.g. jie “borrow”/”lend”) and the availability of deprivative meaning in this construction (for verbs like tou “steal”), a fact which attracted attention in subsequent learnability studies on the acquisition of verb argument structure (cf. Chung and Gordon 1998). Worth mentioning also is the hundred-page long paper of Tang (1983), which remains to date the most comprehensive formal description of cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences in Chinese. In this seminal work, he observed the complementary nature of the pseudo-cleft sentence (Ta xue de shi yuyanxue “What he studied was linguistics”) and the cleft sentence (Shi ta xue yuyanxue de “It was him/her who studied linguistics”; Ta shi xue yuyanxu de “It was studying linguistics that s/he did”). He observed also that the de in the pseudo-cleft structure and the de in the cleft shi...de structure are different in nature and function, and should therefore be attributed to different sources. In his detailed description of the semantic properties of the shi..de cleft construction, Professor Tang challenged the traditional view of Dragonov (1958) that the shi..de cleft construction is restricted to description of past events, providing copious examples of the construction occurring in modal and irrealis contexts involving a wide variety of verbs (including both dynamic and stative verbs) (Tang 1983: 179-189). It was pointed out at the same time that the past event restriction does apply, but only to the shi..de cleft construction in which de precedes the object (Ta shi xue de yuyanxue “It was linguistic-study that he did”)，what Professor Tang labeled as fenlie bianju (“variant cleft sentence). The subtle distinction between the two types of shi...de cleft constructions was observed by some scholars in subsequent research (Paul and Whitman 2008), but glossed over by others (Mai and Yuan 2016).
I can go on to list other papers of Professor Tang which I always recommend to students as exemplars of sharp and concise syntactic argumentation, such as his articles on word class distinctions in Chinese (Tang 1979c, 1979d), his comprehensive analysis of the causative suffix –hua (“ize”)，and his seminal paper on verb acquisition in Mandarin (Tang 1989a), but the list will be long and probably inappropriate for this essay of remembrance.
The linguistics examples used by Professor Tang are always rich, detailed and carefully chosen. He taught us to be self-critical and objective, and encouraged us to develop the habit of challenging oneself with counter-examples rather than merely hanging on to confirming data. His objective and rational approach to argumentation is exemplified by his review of Li and Thompson (1981), published in four parts in 1983-1984, and reprinted as Tang (1988c). In this 100-page long commentary, he observed the lack of firm empirical evidence for some of the authors’ claims (e.g. the alleged word order change from SVO to SOV), and the neglect of the crucial feature [ specific] in discussions of referentiality. He pointed to a long list of regularities in Chinese grammar where the authors argue for absence of a clear tendency (e.g. the contexts in which the nominalizer de can be omitted, or the rules governing adjective reduplication). While giving credit to the authors where credit is due, he would always reiterate his commitment to the conception of language as a rule-governed formal system, drawing upon learnability considerations based on language acquisition.
One legacy that Professor Tang has left us with is his insistence on publishing his ideas in Chinese (when he could have easily published in English), unlike the vast majority of his peers. He made it a point of principle to disseminate frontier research ideas in modern linguistics to the broader Chinese reading public. Professor Tang remarked to me on more than one occasion that his first passion was education rather than research, and the target audience he wished to reach out to was the hundreds of millions of Chinese readers, and not the hundreds of English readers. Professor Tang adhered to his philosophy unswervingly, publishing his writings predominantly in Chinese, with the slightest regard for ‘international recognition’. He also thought deeply about practicalities of nativization of western linguistics scholarship, delving into issues of terminology translation (Tang 1992a). I don’t know how the younger generation today will view the issue of language of publication in an increasingly globalized world, but in the days when I first met Professor Tang, the conviction with which he articulated this philosophy had an awakening impact on me as a young man growing up in Hong Kong under the suffocating yoke of British colonialism. The direct and forthright manner in which Professor Tang would put forward his views of commitment was also a visible contrast to the superficial mode of gentlemanly discussion prevalent in English-speaking academia in HK at the time when I received my master’s education.
A well-known line from the Chinese writer Liu Qing（柳青），which struck me when I visited his former residence in Xi’an several years ago, says that “While the road of life is long, the critical steps are often few, especially when one is young” ("人生的道路虽然漫长，但紧要处常常只有几步，特别是当人年轻的时候")。 I consider myself extremely fortunate and privileged to have encountered several mentors during my formative years as a linguistics student, Professor Tang being a very special one among them. Through his personal reflections and writings, Professor Tang has shown me what it means to be a dedicated scholar. His wide ranging contributions to the field, his distinctive research style, and the spirit and practice of his educational philosophy, will continue to remind me of what it means to be an intellectual true to one’s convictions.
References
Chao, Yuen Ren. 1968. A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chung, Ting Ting Rachel and Peter Gordon. 1998. The acquisition of Chinese dative constructions. Proceedings of the 22nd Boston University Conference in Language Development (BUCLD 22 Proceedings), eds. A. Greenhill et al. 109-120.
Dragonov, A. 龙果夫著，1958《现代汉语语法研究》，郑祖庆译。北京：科学出版社。
Hashimoto, Anne Y. 1971. Mandarin syntactic structures. Unicorn (Chi-Lin) No. 8, 1-149. (中译本：安妮·Y·桥本著，1982《现代汉语句法结构》，宁春岩、侯方译。哈尔滨：黑龙江人民出版社。)
Huang, C.-T. James. 1982. Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Huang, C.-T. James. 黄正德。1988. 说「是」和「有」，《中央研究院历史语言研究所集刊》59（1），43-64.
Law, Paul. 2006. Adverbs in A-not-A questions in Mandarin. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 15, 97-136.
Li, Ying-che. 1971. An investigation of case in Chinese grammar. South Orange, N. J. : Seton Hall University Press.
Lin, Jowang. 2003. On restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. The Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies; New Series, Vol 33, No. 1, 199-240.
Lin, Jowang and Chih-Chen Jane Tang. 1995. Modals as verbs in Chinese: a GB perspective. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 66(1), 53-105.
McCawley, James. 1970. English as a VSO language. Language 46(2), 286-299.
Mai, ziyin and Boping Yuan. 2016. Uneven reassembly of tense, telicity and discourse features in L2 acquisition of the Chinese shi..de cleft construction by adult English speakers. Second Language Research 32(2), 247-276.
Paul, Waltraud and John Whitman. 2008. Shi...de focus clefts in Mandarin Chinese. The Linguistic Review 25, 413-451.
Tang, Ting-chi Charles. 1972. A case grammar of spoken Chinese. Taipei: Hai-Guo Book Company.
汤廷池，1979a，汉语的双宾结构，载《国语语法研究论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1979b，中文的关系子句，载《国语语法研究论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1979c, 动词与形容词之间，载《国语语法研究论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1979d, 动词与介词之间，载《国语语法研究论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1979《国语语法研究论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池. 1983. 国语的焦点结构：「分裂句」「分裂变句」「准分裂句」（Focusing constructions in Chinese: Cleft sentences and pseudo-cleft sentences）. In Studies in Chinese syntax and semantics: Universe and scope: presupposition and quantification in Chinese, eds. Tang, Ting-chi, Robert L. Cheng, and Ying-che Li. Taipei: Student Book Company.
汤廷池，1988a，国语疑问句的研究，载《汉语词法句法论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1988b，国语疑问句研究续论，载《汉语词法句法论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1988c，国语语法的主要论题：兼评李讷与汤逊著汉语语法（「之一」至「之五」） ，载《汉语词法句法论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1988《汉语词法句法论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1989a，汉语词法与儿童语言习得：（一）汉语动词，载《汉语词法句法续集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1989《汉语词法句法续集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1992a，汉语语法研究的回顾与展望：兼谈当代语法学的本土化，载《汉语词法句法三集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1992a《汉语词法句法三集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1992b《汉语词法句法四集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1994《汉语词法句法五集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，2002，汉语派生动词“—化”的概念结构与语法功能，《中国语文研究》2002年第1期，9-25.
Teng, Shou-hsin. 1987. Relative clauses in Chinese. Wang Li memorial volume: English volume, ed. The Chinese Language Society of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Joint Publishers.
Tsai, Wei-Tien Dylan. 2003. Three types of existential quantification in Chinese. In Functional structure(s), form and interpretation, eds. Y.-H. Audrey Li and Andrew Simpson, 161-179. London: Routledge Curzon.
Thomas Hun-tak Lee
It was with great sadness that many of us in the field of Chinese linguistics learned of the passing away of Professor Ting-Chi Charles Tang, a distinguished generative linguist who dedicated his entire career to the integration of generative theory with the study of Chinese, the nativization of formal linguistics in the Chinese-speaking world, and the education of several generations of linguists in Taiwan.
A native of Miaoli, Taiwan, Professor Tang received his undergraduate education at National Taiwan University (NTU), majoring in law. He worked at Hsinchu high school for some years before enrolling at the Linguistics Department of the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1960s, then a major center of generative research. The faculty of U T Austin boasted of eminent scholars such as Archibald Hill, Emmon Bach, Carlota Smith and Rudolph Troike. Professor Tang did his master’s studies there during 1963-1964, later returning in the years 1971-1972 to complete his doctoral degree with a dissertation entitled “A case grammar of spoken Chinese”. Professor Tang taught at several national universities in Taiwan in his long teaching career, including Tsing Hua University (as a founding member of the Graduate Institute of Linguistics), Taiwan Normal University, Yuan Ze University, Soochow University and Fu Jen University.
A prolific scholar, Professor Tang has published more than 40 monographs and collected works, spanning the areas of Chinese syntax and morphology, comparative analysis of Chinese, English and Japanese, English grammar, as well as the grammar of Taiwanese. His writings have contributed seminal results on a number of topics, laying the essential groundwork for further exploration by later scholars. For his outstanding achievements in the field, Professor Tang received many prestigious awards, notably the Distinguished Researcher Award of the National Science Council, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Linguistic Association of Taiwan, the Six Arts Medal of the Ministry of Education, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Association of English Language Teachers.
I first met Professor Tang in 1981 as a second-year student on the MA program in Language Studies at the University of Hong Kong, a program based at the Language Center of HKU headed by Professors Robert Lord and Benjamin Tsou. I had the good fortune of attending some of Professor Tang’s lectures and had in-depth discussions with him, in which he would share his sharp insights and no-nonsense views about scholarship, freely and generously. In subsequent years, I wrote him periodically to seek his advice on various scholastic issues, and each time he would kindly reply in considerable detail in his elegant calligraphy. Throughout the 1990s, I had several opportunities of attending his talks at conferences and workshops in the US and Taiwan, and visiting him in Hsinchu. In 1991, colleagues and I at the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong invited Professor Tang to give a keynote lecture at a Conference on the Teaching of Linguistics in Chinese Communities, held at Hong Kong Baptist University. While Professor Tang did not make it in the end for personal reasons, he contributed a paper to the conference, on the indigenization of linguistics in Chinese-speaking communities, later published as Tang (1992a).
While my knowledge of Professor Tang’s multi-faceted scholarship is necessarily limited, I have been carrying around more than half a dozen of his book in my personal library wherever I set up base, be it Hong Kong, Changsha or Tianjin. For me these volumes contain gems of ideas which I found useful to consult repeatedly and also for introducing to students. Professor Tang’s 1972 dissertation represents one of the two major efforts to describe the structure of Chinese within the framework of Fillmore’s case grammar (the other being Li (1971)). It was an innovative proposal to analyze Chinese as a verb-initial language, parallel to similar analyses of English (McCawley 1970). The arguments for a verb-initial analysis of Chinese were based on typological generalizations, direction of gapping, and theory-internal considerations such as simplicity and economy, which can be attained if a subjectivization transformation was postulated. In this dissertation can be found various early formulations which were further developed by Professor Tang in later years and taken up by other scholars. Professor Tang proposed a main verb analysis of Chinese auxiliaries, which he thought was necessitated by the axiom of one negator per clause (cf. the analysis of Lin and Tang (1995) along similar lines). In this dissertation also we found discussion of the important issue of whether you “have” before a NP in Chinese should be regarded as an existential verb or a determiner, with Professor Tang advocating the former position，an issue probed in further depth in Huang (1988) and Tsai (2003).
Several other syntactic analyses proposed in the dissertation are noteworthy: his analysis of negation, questions, and relative clauses. On the analysis of interrogatives, he drew attention to important differences in presupposition and interrogative force between the sentence final particle questions on the one hand, and the A-not-A and wh-questions on the other: only the latter bear a +int feature in his analysis. Professor Tang was the first to observe minimality effects in the placement of the negator, observing that the negator needs to attach to the first [+verb] element in the sentence, based on the highly marked status of sentences such as Ta zai jiali bu chi fan (“s/he-at-home-not-eat-rice” compared with Ta bu zai jiali chifan (“s/he-not-at-home-eat-rice”) (Tang 1972:40). He was also the first to observe intervention effects in A-not-A questions, pointing to the ungrammaticality of an A-not-A operation on a VP modified by an adverb as in *Ta keneng hui bu hui lai (“s/he probably will not will come”). His early insights on Chinese interrogative structure were expounded in his monograph-length papers published as Tang (1988a, 1988b), which predated more recent analyses of constraints on A-not-A questions (cf. Law 2006). In his dissertation also we found an early discussion of the restrictive vs non-restrictive distinction in Chinese relative clauses (following Chao 1968; around the same time as Hashimoto 1971), in which Professor Tang observed restrictions on ordering, such as the unacceptability of having the relative clause precede “Det-CL-N” when the classifier related phrase is a universal quantifier. Professor Tang pursued this issue in greater detail in Tang (1979a), a paper that paved way for later discussions (Huang 1982; Teng 1987; Lin 2003).
I should mention two other seminal papers of Professor Tang: one on the double object construction, and the other on cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions in Chinese. Tang (1979b) provides the first detailed formal treatment of the double object construction, classifying it into four types based on the verbs appearing in it, each with distinctive thematic properties and movement possibilities with respect to dative alternation, passivization, topicalization and relativization. Professor Tang also made interesting observations on the direction of transfer signaled by the verb (e.g. jie “borrow”/”lend”) and the availability of deprivative meaning in this construction (for verbs like tou “steal”), a fact which attracted attention in subsequent learnability studies on the acquisition of verb argument structure (cf. Chung and Gordon 1998). Worth mentioning also is the hundred-page long paper of Tang (1983), which remains to date the most comprehensive formal description of cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences in Chinese. In this seminal work, he observed the complementary nature of the pseudo-cleft sentence (Ta xue de shi yuyanxue “What he studied was linguistics”) and the cleft sentence (Shi ta xue yuyanxue de “It was him/her who studied linguistics”; Ta shi xue yuyanxu de “It was studying linguistics that s/he did”). He observed also that the de in the pseudo-cleft structure and the de in the cleft shi...de structure are different in nature and function, and should therefore be attributed to different sources. In his detailed description of the semantic properties of the shi..de cleft construction, Professor Tang challenged the traditional view of Dragonov (1958) that the shi..de cleft construction is restricted to description of past events, providing copious examples of the construction occurring in modal and irrealis contexts involving a wide variety of verbs (including both dynamic and stative verbs) (Tang 1983: 179-189). It was pointed out at the same time that the past event restriction does apply, but only to the shi..de cleft construction in which de precedes the object (Ta shi xue de yuyanxue “It was linguistic-study that he did”)，what Professor Tang labeled as fenlie bianju (“variant cleft sentence). The subtle distinction between the two types of shi...de cleft constructions was observed by some scholars in subsequent research (Paul and Whitman 2008), but glossed over by others (Mai and Yuan 2016).
I can go on to list other papers of Professor Tang which I always recommend to students as exemplars of sharp and concise syntactic argumentation, such as his articles on word class distinctions in Chinese (Tang 1979c, 1979d), his comprehensive analysis of the causative suffix –hua (“ize”)，and his seminal paper on verb acquisition in Mandarin (Tang 1989a), but the list will be long and probably inappropriate for this essay of remembrance.
The linguistics examples used by Professor Tang are always rich, detailed and carefully chosen. He taught us to be self-critical and objective, and encouraged us to develop the habit of challenging oneself with counter-examples rather than merely hanging on to confirming data. His objective and rational approach to argumentation is exemplified by his review of Li and Thompson (1981), published in four parts in 1983-1984, and reprinted as Tang (1988c). In this 100-page long commentary, he observed the lack of firm empirical evidence for some of the authors’ claims (e.g. the alleged word order change from SVO to SOV), and the neglect of the crucial feature [ specific] in discussions of referentiality. He pointed to a long list of regularities in Chinese grammar where the authors argue for absence of a clear tendency (e.g. the contexts in which the nominalizer de can be omitted, or the rules governing adjective reduplication). While giving credit to the authors where credit is due, he would always reiterate his commitment to the conception of language as a rule-governed formal system, drawing upon learnability considerations based on language acquisition.
One legacy that Professor Tang has left us with is his insistence on publishing his ideas in Chinese (when he could have easily published in English), unlike the vast majority of his peers. He made it a point of principle to disseminate frontier research ideas in modern linguistics to the broader Chinese reading public. Professor Tang remarked to me on more than one occasion that his first passion was education rather than research, and the target audience he wished to reach out to was the hundreds of millions of Chinese readers, and not the hundreds of English readers. Professor Tang adhered to his philosophy unswervingly, publishing his writings predominantly in Chinese, with the slightest regard for ‘international recognition’. He also thought deeply about practicalities of nativization of western linguistics scholarship, delving into issues of terminology translation (Tang 1992a). I don’t know how the younger generation today will view the issue of language of publication in an increasingly globalized world, but in the days when I first met Professor Tang, the conviction with which he articulated this philosophy had an awakening impact on me as a young man growing up in Hong Kong under the suffocating yoke of British colonialism. The direct and forthright manner in which Professor Tang would put forward his views of commitment was also a visible contrast to the superficial mode of gentlemanly discussion prevalent in English-speaking academia in HK at the time when I received my master’s education.
A well-known line from the Chinese writer Liu Qing（柳青），which struck me when I visited his former residence in Xi’an several years ago, says that “While the road of life is long, the critical steps are often few, especially when one is young” ("人生的道路虽然漫长，但紧要处常常只有几步，特别是当人年轻的时候")。 I consider myself extremely fortunate and privileged to have encountered several mentors during my formative years as a linguistics student, Professor Tang being a very special one among them. Through his personal reflections and writings, Professor Tang has shown me what it means to be a dedicated scholar. His wide ranging contributions to the field, his distinctive research style, and the spirit and practice of his educational philosophy, will continue to remind me of what it means to be an intellectual true to one’s convictions.
References
Chao, Yuen Ren. 1968. A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chung, Ting Ting Rachel and Peter Gordon. 1998. The acquisition of Chinese dative constructions. Proceedings of the 22nd Boston University Conference in Language Development (BUCLD 22 Proceedings), eds. A. Greenhill et al. 109-120.
Dragonov, A. 龙果夫著，1958《现代汉语语法研究》，郑祖庆译。北京：科学出版社。
Hashimoto, Anne Y. 1971. Mandarin syntactic structures. Unicorn (Chi-Lin) No. 8, 1-149. (中译本：安妮·Y·桥本著，1982《现代汉语句法结构》，宁春岩、侯方译。哈尔滨：黑龙江人民出版社。)
Huang, C.-T. James. 1982. Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Huang, C.-T. James. 黄正德。1988. 说「是」和「有」，《中央研究院历史语言研究所集刊》59（1），43-64.
Law, Paul. 2006. Adverbs in A-not-A questions in Mandarin. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 15, 97-136.
Li, Ying-che. 1971. An investigation of case in Chinese grammar. South Orange, N. J. : Seton Hall University Press.
Lin, Jowang. 2003. On restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. The Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies; New Series, Vol 33, No. 1, 199-240.
Lin, Jowang and Chih-Chen Jane Tang. 1995. Modals as verbs in Chinese: a GB perspective. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 66(1), 53-105.
McCawley, James. 1970. English as a VSO language. Language 46(2), 286-299.
Mai, ziyin and Boping Yuan. 2016. Uneven reassembly of tense, telicity and discourse features in L2 acquisition of the Chinese shi..de cleft construction by adult English speakers. Second Language Research 32(2), 247-276.
Paul, Waltraud and John Whitman. 2008. Shi...de focus clefts in Mandarin Chinese. The Linguistic Review 25, 413-451.
Tang, Ting-chi Charles. 1972. A case grammar of spoken Chinese. Taipei: Hai-Guo Book Company.
汤廷池，1979a，汉语的双宾结构，载《国语语法研究论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1979b，中文的关系子句，载《国语语法研究论集》台北：学生书局。
汤廷池，1979c, 动词与形容词之间，载《国语语法研究论集》台北：学生书局。
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