王士元教授
王士元教授1933年生於上海。幼時隨祖父母移居祖籍安徽懷遠。他常常說祖母雖然不識字，但是卻是孩童時期對他影響最為深遠的人，教會了他許多做人處事的道理。正是因為這種影響，即使入籍美國多年，他始終認為自己是中國人，要為振興大中華而努力。1937年七七事變後，王教授跟隨父母到上海生活並在當地讀書。1948年10月，他又隨全家來到紐約。中學畢業後入讀哥倫比亞大學，隨後又在密西根大學獲得語言學碩士和博士學位。由於自小生活的環境中就接觸到多種語言和方言，在上海的租界居住時經常可以接觸法語和日語等，他很早就對世界語言的多樣和神奇有著直觀的感受。求學期間又有機會得到當時美國多位著名語言學家的教導，這些都讓他堅定地選擇了矢志一生的學術道路。
王教授1962年赴俄亥俄州立大學任英語系助理教授，隨後在該校創辦了語言學及東亞語言文學兩個系，並擔任兩系的系主任。1966年王教授轉到他父親的母校加州大學柏克萊分校任教，直至1995年退休。任職於柏克萊時，他主持成立了語音實驗室 （Phonology Laboratory），創辦了Journal of Chinese Linguistics《中國語言學報》，這是中國語言學領域的第一份國際性學刊。他建立了漢語方言的電子詞典，這是當時最早的漢語方言語料庫，發表了著名的詞彙擴散理論（Theory of Lexical Diffusion），認為語言變遷在語音上是驟變的，但在詞彙上卻是漸變的。起初曾有些專精於印歐語研究的學者對詞彙擴散理論表示質疑，並認為這套理論是基於漢語語料建立的，對歐美語言不一定適用。但如今，詞彙擴散理論已被廣泛應用於世界範圍內多種語言的研究上，而且不止在語音、聲調上，也適用在構詞和句法上，如今已成為語言學教科書上必然會提到的一套研究範式。
1997年，王教授親眼見證了香港的回歸，這也堅定了他本人重回祖國懷抱的信念。他因此而又開啟了一段更加輝煌的學術人生。他先是在香港城市大學擔任語言工程講座教授，後又應聘為香港中文大學研究教授，同時任教於電子工程系和語言學及現代語言系，並在電子工程系建立了語言工程實驗室，與那裏的理工科學生一起進行許多語言建模仿真的研究，加深了人們對語言演化的理解，包括人類的語言如何湧現、如何變遷等，還啟動了演化語言學國際研討會（Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics）這個頗負盛名的系列學術研討會。
離開中文大學後，2015年王教授又以八十二歲高齡獲聘為香港理工大學語言與認知科學講座教授。他此時的研究興趣已由單純的語言研究轉向認知退化的探索。眾所周知，語言習得領域對嬰兒如何習得母語已經有了豐碩的研究文獻與可觀的研究成果，但對於老年階段語言如何退化消失，所知卻遠遠不足。有鑒於人口老化已是全球不得不面對的嚴峻挑戰，隨著醫療進步和環境衛生的改善，保持健康身體的同時該如何維護認知能力的活躍，是高齡化社會必定要應對的問題。王教授在理工大學正積極開展研究，冀望能藉由測量腦電波等種種腦造影技術，來對認知障礙進行早期的診斷評估，以期能防患於未然，在大腦開始呈現失智退化的跡象前，就能及早發現並採取相應措施來減緩這個趨勢。
王教授曾說，「不同學科之間的邊界猶如畫在沙灘上的線條，隨著每一次先進知識的波濤到來，這邊界就會發生變化，甚至完全消失。人類的知識，特別是研究語言的知識，應該是彼此相連的，並且最終是相互貫通的。」他雖然年少赴美，心裏卻始終記掛著自己是華人，要為華人爭光。1973年，闊別祖國二十五年後的王教授第一次回到中國講學，當年就成為中國語言學界的一大盛事。從那時起的過去半個多世紀裏，他經常奔波兩岸四地，到各地講學並從事合作研究。他多次滿懷深情地告訴同行們，語言學十九世紀發跡於歐洲，二十世紀興盛於美國，但我們要讓二十一世紀的大中華成為語言學研究的中心。他這番語重心長的話，不僅是對所有中國語言學研究者的殷切期盼，也是他一輩子兢兢業業、念茲在茲的奮鬥目標！
Professor William Shiyuan Wang
Professor William Shiyuan Wang was born in Shanghai in 1933. In early childhood, he moved with his grandparents to Huaiyuan, his ancestral hometown in Anhui Province. He often says that his grandmother, although illiterate, was the most profound influence on him as a child. She taught him a lot about conducting himself in the world. It is because of this influence that Professor Wang always identifies himself as Chinese and shares the aspiration to revitalise the Chinese nation even after becoming an American citizen for many years. After the July 7 Incident of 1937, Professor Wang followed his parents to Shanghai, where he lived and studied. In October 1948, he came to New York with his family. After graduating from high school, he entered Columbia College and continued his studies at the University of Michigan, where he received his master’s and doctoral degrees in linguistics. Having been exposed to a wide range of languages and dialects since childhood, including French and Japanese during his stay in the Shanghai French Concession, Professor Wang developed an intuitive sense of the diversity and wonder of the world’s languages at an early age. When studying abroad, he also had the opportunity to learn from multiple renowned American linguists at the time. All these experiences set him firmly on the academic path, which he has pursued with unremitting devotion.
Professor Wang became an Assistant Professor of the Department of English at the Ohio State University in 1962. Afterwards, he founded and chaired two departments at the university, the Department of Linguistics and the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. In 1966, he moved to his father’s alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his retirement in 1995. At Berkeley, Professor Wang shepherded the establishment of the Phonology Laboratory, founded the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, the first international journal in Chinese linguistics, and built an electronic dictionary of Chinese dialects, which was the earliest corpus of Chinese dialects at that time. He also published his famous Theory of Lexical Diffusion, which holds that language change is phonetically abrupt but lexically gradual. Initially, his theory was questioned by some scholars specialising in Indo-European languages, as they considered that the theory was based on a Chinese corpus and thus might not be applicable to European and American languages. Nowadays, however, the Theory of Lexical Diffusion has been widely applied to the study of many languages around the world, not only in terms of phonology and intonation, but also in terms of word formation and syntax. Professor Wang’s theory has now become an inevitable research paradigm in linguistics textbooks.
Professor Wang witnessed Hong Kong’s handover in 1997, which reconfirmed his determination to return to his motherland. His decision to return ushered in a new chapter in his academic life of even more dazzling achievements. He first became a Chair Professor of Language Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong, and then served as a Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he taught concurrently in the Department of Electronic Engineering and the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages. He established a Linguistic Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Electronic Engineering, where he carried out research with STEM students on the modelling and simulation of language. His work deepened people’s understanding of language evolution in terms of how human languages emerge and change. Apart from that, Professor Wang also initiated the Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics, a prestigious series of symposia.
After leaving the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Professor Wang, at the age of eighty-two, was appointed Chair Professor of Language and Cognitive Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2015. His research interest by then had shifted from pure linguistic study to cognitive decline. As is generally known, the field of language acquisition is well-documented with impressive research results on how infants acquire their mother tongue, yet much less is known about how language functions deteriorate and disappear in old age. The world could no longer ignore the pressing challenge of population aging. With the advancement of health care and improvement of environmental sanitation, people living in an aging society have to find ways to remain not only physically fit but also cognitively active. At the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Professor Wang is pushing forward research in early diagnosis and assessment of cognitive impairment through brainwave measurements and other brain imaging techniques. It is hoped that early diagnosis can be made and preventive measures taken before any sign of cognitive decline appears, so as to slow down the deterioration.
‘The boundaries between disciplines,’ Professor Wang once said, ‘are like lines drawn in the sand, changing with the arrival of each wave of advanced knowledge or being completely washed away. Human knowledge, especially in terms of language studies, should be interconnected and ultimately coherent.’ Although he went to the United States at a young age, he always remembers that he is Chinese and should win credit for the Chinese people. In 1973, twenty-five years after leaving his motherland, Professor Wang returned to China for the first time to give lectures, a major event that year in the Chinese linguistic community. Since then, he has been travelling to different places within the Chinese mainland, in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao to give lectures and conduct collaborative research. Professor Wang repeatedly told his colleagues with enthusiasm that linguistics originated in Europe in the nineteenth century and flourished in the United States in the twentieth century, and now it was time to make China the centre of linguistic research in the twenty-first century. These earnest words not only conveyed his keen expectations of all Chinese linguistic researchers, but also captured his assiduous endeavour to achieve his lifelong mission!
