Sinitic languages Wang has made contributions to the genetic classification of Sinitic languages and their typological peculiarities, including the study of its tones. He has published on Chinese phonology, tones, syntax, as well as overviews of Chinese languages, and tone languages generally. In addition to his research contributions, he was elected as the first president of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (founded in 1992). He co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics with Chaofen Sun in 2015. He is credited with founding the Department of East Asian languages in addition to the Department of Linguistics at
Ohio State University.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics Wang founded the
Journal of Chinese Linguistics (; ) in 1973. He has edited the journal since its foundation. He is currently Honorary Editor. The journal has published peer-reviewed articles covering many aspects of the Chinese language, including its
phonetics,
phonology,
morphology,
syntax,
grammar,
semantics,
pragmatics, and
Chinese writing systems. It has also published papers on
historical linguistics,
comparative linguistics,
computational linguistics,
psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics,
evolutionary linguistics,
sociolinguistics,
applied linguistics, languages in contact,
language change,
language families. The Journal also publishes a monograph series.
Database of Chinese dialects In 1966, Wang created the first electronic database of Chinese dialects, known as the Dictionary on Computer (DOC). DOC started as a basic corpus of 2,444 morphemes, each corresponding to a single Chinese logograph (ideograph). Each of these was referenced by a unique four-digit number assigned by the telegraphic service in China. The pronunciation(s) for each morpheme was given in each of 23 Chinese dialects or sources spanning 14 centuries, totaling 58,012 entries. a study of the historical processes of nasalization and denasalization.
Lexical diffusion The Dictionary on Computer formed the basis for Wang's theory of language change known as
lexical diffusion. An important early paper outlining this theory was "Competing Changes as a Cause of Residue" published in the journal
Language. In an article titled “Tone change in Chaozhou Chinese: A study in lexical diffusion,” he disputed the
Neogrammarian assumption of “sound laws” in the ways that the phonetic inventories of languages evolve, with the changes putatively applying swiftly and across the board to classes of sounds. Consistent with his later position that grammars leak, he pointed out exceptions to sound classes in the spread of changes. He argued that sound changes affect one word at a time, spreading gradually to other lexical items that have the same sounds (in similar phonological environment) when they get to be used, subject to the usage frequencies of the lexical items in which they occur and the analogies established by speakers. Words that are less frequently used or joined the lexicon at a different times may not undergo the change. He has refined his position in several other papers. As a measure of the importance of this idea, a search for "lexical diffusion" on scholar.google.com on February 24, 2021, yielded over 5,380 results.
General perspective on language Wang has long believed there has been an excessive emphasis in Linguistics on strict formalisms. He has credited the linguist
Joseph Greenberg with being an important influence in this regard. In an interview in 2010, he stated that he met informally many times with
Joseph Greenberg when both were in the Bay Area in California (Greenberg at
Stanford University and Wang at the
University of California, Berkeley). Wang related Greenberg's response to being shown a formal pattern of
tone sandhi changes that Wang had discovered in
Min Chinese dialects: He says “you’ve shown me a clever trick with a formalism, what do I learn about the nature of language, what do I learn about the nature of Min with this clever trick?” and I went home frustrated, and thought and thought and thought, and I realized how extremely right he was. How excessive abstraction, excessive formalism, removing us from the empirical foundations of language is leading linguistics down the wrong track. 1978: "The three scales of diachrony" and 1982: "Explorations in language evolution." In 1984 he published a commentary critiquing Bickerton's "Language Bioprogram Hypothesis" target article in the journal
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, arguing against the Chomskian perspective that language was largely independent of other aspects of cognition: [...] the fact that language involves biological equipment does not necessarily lead to the "highly modular task-specific cognitive devices" and "equally modular and task-specific processing component" that Bickerton advocates. A piece of equipment may be involved in a certain task, but it may be used for other tasks as well, without being specific to any particular one of them. The devices used in language are surely involved in the more global (and evolutionarily prior) tasks of cognition, memory, and perception. Our goal is to elucidate how these general purpose devices interact with the specific requirements of learning and using language. To posit anything specific to language, in the sense that it serves no other non- linguistic function, seems to me not called for at this point. In 1996, Wang co-authored another commentary in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences arguing that syntax was not likely an independent cognitive module: The belief that syntax is an innate, autonomous, species-specific module is highly questionable. Syntax demonstrates the mosaic nature of evolutionary change, in that it made use of (and led to the enhancement of) numerous preexisting neurocognitive features. It is best understood as an emergent characteristic of the explosion of semantic complexity that occurred during hominid evolution. Wang guest-edited a special issue on language evolution in 1991 in
Scientific American. He and his students/collaborators have published their work of modeling language change and evolution in venues such as
Trends in Ecology and Evolution (2005),
Language and Linguistics (2005),
Lingua (2008), in addition to various other Chinese language journals. He has also recognized the value of computational explorations of language evolution. A lecture given by Wang in Singapore in March 2014 titled "Language Evolution & Some Phase Transitions," which discusses his recent views on language evolution is available on YouTube. Wang has also collaborated with scholars outside linguistics, including
John Holland, who was best known for his work on
complex systems approaches and pioneering the use of
genetic algorithms and
learning classifier systems in computational simulations. In 2005, both Wang and Holland were co-authors with several others on a paper exploring computational simulations of the evolution of the lexicon and syntax. Wang collaborated with several geneticists on a study of
Y-chromosome DNA variation as a means to infer population history of East Asia. Wang was co-author on a paper on brain structure/function with the biochemist and anthropologist,
Vincent Sarich, who was a pioneer in
molecular evolution. He has also collaborated with the anthropologist P. Thomas Schoenemann on topics related to language evolution.
International Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics In 2009, Wang started the International Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics, or CIEL, which has been held every year since then, first in Guangzhou, then in Tianjin, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Xiamen, Kunming, Nanjing, Bloomington, Indiana, and Shanghai (again). Summaries of each of these have been published in the
Journal of Chinese Linguistics each year.
Language complexity Wang has emphasized bridging
evolutionary linguistics with
evolutionary biology, as well as connecting research on linguistic complexity to complexity in
cybernetics, directing attention to interactions of subsystems or modules within a language. Unlike those of the
Chomskian tradition, he has resisted reducing linguistic complexity to formal rules within the system. He is among the first to have conceived of languages as
complex adaptive systems, with emergent patterns in constant state of flux and in search of equilibrium, a position that makes it easier to account for the actuation of the so-called “internally-motivated change.”. Another study involved assessing the strength of associations between a variety of cognitive tasks - including several tapping linguistic functions specifically - with brain size and some basic brain subcomponents measured using structural
MRI on a set of sibling pairs (to control for between-family environmental effects). He co-authored a functional
MRI study exploring the neural bases of congenital
amusia in tonal language speakers. He has also co-authored research using
EEG event-related potentials to study the time course of context-dependent talker normalization in spoken word identification, and has also contributed to work investigating
EEG delta, theta, beta, and gamma brain oscillations during different levels of auditory sentence processing. He has published on lateralized
Stroop interference effects with Chinese characters using a reaction time paradigm. He helped found the Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience at the
Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2019.
Festschrifts 2004:
The Joy of Linguistic Research. A Festschrift for Prof. William S-Y. Wang’s 70th Birthday. Co-edited by Shi Feng and Zhongwei Shen. Tianjin: Nankai University Press. (23 papers in English and Chinese, 271 pages) 2005:
POLA Forever: Festschrift in Honor of Professor William S-Y. Wang on his 70th Birthday. Co-edited by D-A Ho and O. Tzeng. Language and Linguistics Monograph Series w3, Taiwan: Academia Sinica. (16 papers in English and Chinese, 319 pages) 2010:
The Joy of Linguistic Research II. A Festschrift for Prof. William S-Y. Wang’s 75th Birthday. Co-edited by Pan Wuyun and Zhongwei Shen. Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press. (25 papers in English and Chinese, 419 pages) 2013:
Eastward Flows the Great River: Festschrift in Honor of Professor William S-Y. WANG on his 80th Birthday. (2 volumes: One in Chinese, with 43 separate article chapters covering 739 pages, and the other in English, with 25 article chapters covering 513 pages) 2018:
Wangmen Qiuxue Ji, A Festschrift for Prof. William S-Y. Wang’s 85th Birthday, Co-edited Zhongwei Shen, Kong Jiangping, and Wang Feng. Kunming: Yunnan University Press. (17 articles in English and Chinese, 237 pages) == Awards ==