I am broadly interested in studying the interrelation between morphosyntax, discourse, prosody, and more. Although my research programme, as can be seen from this page, consists of many facets, all of the topics I look at tightly interlocked and connected, such that most of my work falls into multiple categories.
Referent accessibility and referential forms
We know that when we produce linguistic forms referent accessibility – the ease of ‘getting at’ a referent – has profound effects on the linguistic form we choose. Similarly, when we interpret a linguistic form, we partially rely on its form to figure out its referent. A traditional assumption in the literature is that these forms are ranked linearly on a hierarchy, with forms like zeros and person indices being the most accessible, and noun phrases with extensive modification being the least. But many languages have a variety of linguistic forms seemingly located at similar levels of accessibility. Is accessibility in fact a multidimensional notion, where form-choice depends not purely on a single accessibility value, but may also be sensitive to the source of accessibility?
Lai, (Ryan) Ka Yau. 2021. Sources of accessibility: Distinguishing the two reflexives of Late Archaic and Early Middle Chinese. UC Santa Barbara MA thesis. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8jd83960. (28 March, 2023).
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau. 2023. Beyond anaphoric and emphatic: diversity and unity in the functions of literary Chinese reflexive zì. Folia Linguistica. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/flin-2023-2042.
+other papers in preparation …
Dialogicality, reproduction, and conventionalisation
When we use language, everything we say is connected to a history of utterances that we have produced and received before, alongside all the other instances of production that our interlocutors have, in turn, received before. Just as we as humans are all interdependent and inseparable from each other, so are the utterances we produce. But in what situations exactly do we reproduce the forms of others’ utterances? Why do we do it, and what are the effects of such reproduction, both on the immediate discourse situation, and – if only very slightly – on the conventional practices of the language community?
Song, Yoonsang & Ryan Ka Yau Lai. 2021. Syntactic representations encode grammatical functions: evidence from the priming of mapping between grammatical functions and thematic roles in Cantonese. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 36(10). 1329–1342. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2021.1942086.
Song, Yoonsang & Ryan Ka Yau Lai. 2022. Shared syntactic representations in bilinguals: Evidence from the constituent-structure-independent passive priming between Cantonese and English. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 12(5). 571–597. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.20046.son.
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau, Lily Zihe Yin, Alice Yimeng Zhang, Yuting Jiang, Bill Shiyang Xin and Junwei Gao (accepted). Turn design, resonance and epistemic stance in the Diamond Sutra: A dialogic constructionist approach. Proceedings of the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 37).
+other papers in preparation …
The construction of intersubjectivity in discourse
I understand intersubjectivity to be the relationship between subjectivities – including not just overlaps between subjectivities, but also mutually understood differences, such as disagreements and epistemic and deontic gradients. How do language users construct intersubjectivity, whether to highlight, downplay, enhance, reduce, or just to understand it? What are the linguistic resources for doing so and to what extent are these practices conventionalised vs. occasioned or situated?
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau, Lily Zihe Yin, Alice Yimeng Zhang, Yuting Jiang, Bill Shiyang Xin and Junwei Gao (accepted). Turn design, resonance and epistemic stance in the Diamond Sutra: A dialogic constructionist approach. Proceedings of the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 37).
+other papers in preparation …
Complex predicates and the construction network
Complex predicates may be loosely defined as constructions where the event is expressed by more than just the verb, but is spread across multiple units such as a noun and a verb, an adjective and a verb, or two verbs. What is the best way to characterise these constructions – or rather, families of constructions – across different families? Is it possible to have multiple taxonomies of such constructions, each of which is based on a different aspect of them? What is the role of (a)symmetry – i.e. the differential importance of different parts of the complex predicate? And how exactly should the argument structures of complex predicates be described – as derived from simple predicates’ structures, or something entirely separate?
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau & Michelle Man-Long Pang. 2023. Rethinking the description and typology of Cantonese causative–resultative constructions: a dynamic constructionist lens. Languages 8(2). 151. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8020151.
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau. accepted. Beyond bidirectional association: Distinguishing light verb constructions from other conventionalised noun-verb combinations in modern Tibetan. In Fleischhauer, J. & Riccio, A. (eds.), Light verb constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective. (preprint)
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau. accepted. Tupleised co-occurrence measures vs LLM word embeddings for corpus linguistics: The case of English light verb construction detection. Proceedings of the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 38). (preprint)
+other papers in preparation …
The limits of referentiality
Reference is a fundamental concept in linguistics. Prototypical instances of reference – such as the use of noun phrases like the black cat or Barack Obama – seem straightforward enough. Lurking behind this apparent clarity, are a variety of forms that seem to be borderline referential, or straightforwardly referential in some cases but not others. For example, adverbs in many languages are transparently derived from referential expressions, or the combination of a referential expression and a case marker. How do these adverbs arise diachronically? How do they lose their referential status, and gain temporal, information-structural, or evaluative-epistemic-evidential meanings? How do we draw the line between a referential and a non-referential use?
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau. 2023. Beyond anaphoric and emphatic: diversity and unity in the functions of literary Chinese reflexive zì. Folia Linguistica. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/flin-2023-2042.
+other papers in preparation …
Order of meaningful elements
One of the unique featuers of human language is that most signs are not holistic, but combine with other signs to form a single message. Combination of signs, however, naturally means that we need to present them in a linear sequence. When are such sequences meaningful, when are they the relatively automatic result of constraints on production and processing, and – more importantly – can those cognitive and communicative pressures lead to the conventionalisation of ordering in a way that goes beyond the original motivations?
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau. 2018. Factors affecting object preposing in Cantonese complex predicates. LECT – HKU Working papers 1.
+other papers in preparation …
The interdependence of prosody and grammar
Received linguistic thinking often implicitly thinks of grammar as prior to prosody – prosody is seen as either derivative from grammatical structures, or at the mercy of the needs of on-line processing. But increasingly, linguists have found that prosody may in fact play a bigger role than we thought in shaping grammar: Prosodic integration, for example, frequently precedes syntactic integration, and the functions of particles are closely interlinked with their associated prosody, with interjections in particular sometimes being inherently associated with particular tunes. How can we better integrate prosodic and grammatical research?
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau, Lu Liu, Haoran Yan & John W DuBois. 2023. From position to function: Exploring word distributions within intonation units in American English conversation. Proceedings of the 27th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue.
Gordon, Matthew K., Argyro Katsika, Sherry Chien, Jiyoung Jang and Ryan Ka-Yau Lai. 2023. Speech rhythm metrics: a typological survey. Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
Corpus-linguistic methodology
One of my long-standing interests lies in corpus-linguistic methodology. I see corpus linguistics as the most exciting, yet also the most challenging source of data in linguistics, as we must deal with large amounts of data, influenced by a myriad factors. I have worked on both tools for annotation and data management, and on data analysis.
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau & Youngah Do. 2020. Large-sample confidence intervals of information-theoretic measures in linguistics. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science 6(1). 19–54. https://doi.org/10.1558/jrds.40134.
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau, Yujie Li & Shujie Zhang. 2023. Text segmentation similarity revisited: a flexible distance-based approach for multiple boundary types. University of Massachusetts Amherst. https://doi.org/10.7275/FK79-FV58.
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau. 2023. rezonateR: An R package for analysing coherence in conversation. In Proceedings of the 27th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SEMDIAL 2023 – Marilogue). Maribor, Slovenia.
Lai, Ryan Ka Yau. 2023. From annotation to analysis: Exploring conversational dynamics with rezonateR. Proceedings of the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 37).
Suprasegmental phonology and phonetics
In some of my work, I have also examined suprasegmental elements on a lexical level. Although this work is less integrated with the rest of my research on a theoretical level, it has taught me methodological insights that still influences my other work.
Do, Youngah & Ryan Ka Yau Lai. 2021. Accounting for lexical tones when modeling phonological distance. Language 97(1). e39–e67. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2021.0008.
Do, Youngah & Ryan Ka Yau Lai. 2020. Incorporating tone in the modelling of wordlikeness judgements. Phonology 37(4). 577–615. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0952675720000287.
黎嘉祐 [lɐi̯˨˩ kaː˥ jɐu̯˨] 