Howdy y’all! My name is Haowen Jiang (or ʨiɑŋ xaw wən in IPA and 江豪文 in characters). I am currently a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Rice University, Houston, TX. I graduated from National Taiwan University at Taipei with an MA in Linguistics in 2006. After graduation, I served in the Army at Kinmen, a small island to the west of Taiwan (ROC), for over a year. From 2007 to 2008, I worked as a research assistant on an Isbukun Bunun dictionary project until I came to Rice in Aug 2008.
My research interests include:
(1) in terms of broad research agendas—(i) language typology and universals, (ii) Cognitive/functional linguistics; (iii) discourse analysis
(2) in terms of specific research topics—(i) grammars of space (e.g. Motion events, demonstratives, route descriptions, etc.), (ii) nominalization, complementation, and relativization, (iii) evidentiality and epistemic modality, (iv) metaphors and metonymies, and (v) discourse/pragmatic markers;
(3) in terms of research languages—(i) Austronesian languages (mostly Formosan) and (ii) Sinitic languages (mostly Mandarin, Min, Hakka)
Trivia: A linguisticky Anglocization of my given name would be “How-When”. Too bad that I don’t work on interrogatives. But partly because of this homonymy, I am branded with the sobriquet “Captain Interrogatives”.
[Short Bio]
I’ve been fascinated by anything foreign since my teens, which makes it seem only natural that I would major in foreign languages and literature at college. And I did, at National Taiwan University, from which I graduated in 2003 with not only a BA degree in humanities, but also a growing interest in linguistics. Driven by such curiosity, I enrolled in the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at the same university, thinking I would learn more foreign languages than I did as an undergraduate, only to find myself hooked on local languages that are even more foreign than those abroad. My learning journey about Formosan languages began with Kavalan, the target language of a fieldwork course then taught by Prof. Li-May Sung. It was also the language I wrote my MA thesis on, exploring spatial conceptualizations under the supervision of Prof. Shuanfan Huang. After graduating from GIL in 2006, I enjoyed a short period without school for the first time in 19 years. For nearly a year, I served in the army, stationed on an islet over 300 kilometers away: Little Kinmen. Tiny indeed and far from home, but little did I know I would later end up pursuing my doctoral degree four times that distance in the biggest (save Alaska) of the United States. At Rice University, in Houston, I became an advisee of Prof. Masayoshi Shibatani and thus continued to be trained in the functional-typological framework. My research topics over the past few years have included spatial reference, possession, nominalization/relativization, and clitic ordering in Formosan languages, as well as discourse/pragmatic markers in Mandarin and Hakka.