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Minqi Liu
Graduate Student
E-mail: liuminqi@ucla.edu
Pronouns: she, her, hers
Hi! I’m a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA and also a member of UCLA Language Acquisition Lab. I am primarily interested in first language acquisition and theoretical syntax. My dissertation project centers on the syntax and acquisition of passive constructions in Mandarin Chinese.
My work employs experimental methods to address core issues in children’s syntactic development. My recent research concerns how children acquire the syntactic constructions that involve extraction of a nominal phrase over another c-commanding nominal phrase, which usually triggers locality difficulties in child languages (‘Intervention Effects’).
Besides Mandarin, I have also worked on San Cristóbal Lachirioag Zapotec, an under-documented language spoken in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico, and Tonggu Gan, a non-Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in Jiangxi in south China. Before entering the PhD program at UCLA, I earned my B.A. in Chinese Linguistics at Peking University, China.
Please see my CV and my personal website for more research and teaching experiences.
Research Interests: first language acquisition, syntax
Recent News:
- I will give a talk on Intervention effects in Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of passives at the 47th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 47) with Victoria Mateu and Nina Hyams. I have received a Paula Menyuk Travel Award ($350) for this trip.
- I received a Dissertation Year Fellowship ($20,000) from UCLA.
- A paper co-authored by me, Nina Hyams, and Victoria Mateu is to be published in the inaugural issue of Tsinghua Linguistics, entitled The Syntax and Acquisition of Mandarin Sluice-like Constructions.
- I received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant ($1,5001) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for my dissertation project Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Passives with faculty PI Professor Nina Hyams.
- I published a paper in the BUCLD 46 proceedings, titled Prevalence of Long Passives in Child Mandarin: Input and Intervention Effects.