Marjorie K.M. Chan is Associate Professor of Chinese Linguistics in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL), and a Courtesy Faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University. A faculty member at OSU since Autumn 1987, her research area is Chinese linguistics, with focus on phonetics (particularly with respect to prosody-discourse interface), phonology (synchronic and diachronic), and dialectology. Her M.A. thesis at UBC dealt with synchronic and diachronic issues in Zhongshan Cantonese (Yue 粵) phonology, and her Ph.D. dissertation at U. of Washington dealt with synchronic and diachronic issues in Fuzhou (Min 閩) phonology.

Professor Chan's presentations and publications over the decades deal especially with Chinese prosody (including contributing to the development of ToBI systems for Mandarin and Cantonese), humor, language and gender, including pragmatic functions of sentence-final particles (SFPs). Her research interests extend to studies on written Cantonese, Chinese regional operas (with their different dialect bases), and Chinese computing, including corpus linguistics and issues concerning concordancing of Chinese e-texts. Her most recent research includes collaborations on exploring Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and sociolinguistic variation in Cantonese. Her publications include both articles and edited volumes. She also prepared and published the first two issues of the DEALL Newsletter (1998, 1999). (For more details, see her Conferences and Publications pages.)

Professor Chan has held various positions at academic organizations over the years. For example, she was elected as a member of the Board of Directors of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (CLTA) and then elected to be its 3-year, officer sequence of VP, President and Immediate Past President. Professor Chan had also worn another CLTA hat, in serving as the organization's inaugural webmaster in creating CLTA's initial website. (She was also DEALL's inaugural webmaster, enabling DEALL to have web presence well ahead of other East Asian departments.) Elsewhere, Professor Chan had served as Executive Secretary for the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL), and is currently serving as a member of Cantonese Alliance's Board of Governing Directors, web editor for CHINese Oral and PERorming Literature (CHINOPERL), and chair of the Steering Committee for the conference series, the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL). At OSU itself, Professor Chan had served two terms as Director of the Institute for Chinese Studies (ICS) at the East Asian Studies Center (EASC).

Professor Chan has served as an editorial board member for various journals during her years at OSU, such as the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (including as JCLTA Associate Editor), Journal of Chinese Language Teaching, Korea Journal of Chinese Language and Literature, Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, and Nanfang Yuyanxue (南方语言学). Besides serving as an editorial member of some journals, Professor Chan is one of the editorial board members of DEALL Professor Patricia Sieber’s digital project, Chinese Theater Collaborative, initially funded by a Spring 2021 Arts and Humanities Large Grant awarded to Professor Sieber (Principal Investigator) and her small team that included Professor Chan.

Professor Chan, together with Professor Zhiguo Xie (who came to DEALL in 2011), advise graduate students in their M.A. and Ph.D. programs in Chinese Linguistics in DEALL. Professor Chan has also co-advised doctoral students in other OSU departments, as well as served on a number of the Department of Linguistics' dissertation committees. She has also served as an external examiner for theses and dissertations at other institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere. (See her Students page.) In DEALL's past history, she had also advised undergraduate Chinese majors.
 

Prior to coming to OSU, as a doctoral candidate, Professor Chan was a lecturer for one academic year (1984-1985) in the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia where she taught graduate and undergraduate courses in general linguistics. At OSU, Professor Chan offers a number of graduate courses in Chinese linguistics. (During a 15-year period when she was the only faculty member in the Chinese linguistics component, she offered the full range of graduate Chinese linguistics courses, including not only Chinese phonetics and phonology, but Chinese syntax (synchronic and diachronic) as well). Currently, she and Professor Xie share the teaching of both graduate and undergraduate courses in Chinese linguistics. In addition, Professor Chan has taught two different culture-oriented courses. One of these was "Traditional Chinese Culture," an undergraduate course that was passed on to Professor Xie while she still teaches the "Chinese Opera" course, an (under)grad course that introduces kunqu, Beijing (Peking) opera, as well as regional operatic traditions (e.g., huangmeixi, Zhejiang Yueju, Guangdong Yueju). (See her Courses page.)

Professor Chan has served on several student organizations at OSU. She is the advisor to the Graduate Association of Chinese Linguistics (GACL) since its establishment in 2007. GACL plays an important role in leadership training, as its officers contribute to organizing Chinese and East Asian linguistic forums, workshops and conferences. Professor Chan has also served as advisor to two undergraduate student organizations: the Cantonese Club (now dormant), and the Chinese American Student Association (since Spring 2024).

Last but not least, Professor Chan contributed to setting up the endowment fund, James H-Y. Tai Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Fund that supports research in East Asian linguistics in DEALL, and a Cantonese Gamluhk Fund that supports the teaching of Cantonese (and other Cantonese-related activities) at OSU.
 

For more information on Professor Chan's activities, visit her website: http://u.osu.edu/chan.9/.