2025 CSDLD Annual Meeting

The 2025 CSDLD Annual Meeting showcased the research achievements of the Center’s members across various fields of linguistics and facilitated interdisciplinary exchange in the study of local languages. The symposium covered a range of topics, including language technology, historical linguistics, experimental linguistics, as well as the syntax and phonology of Formosan languages. Through diverse research methods and linguistic data, the event highlighted recent developments in the study of Taiwan’s linguistic diversity.

In the area of experimental linguistics and cognitive research, one study employed behavioral experiments and neural measurements to investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying language comprehension and grammatical change. In particular, the research examined innovative transitive uses of originally intransitive verbs in contemporary Mandarin. By analyzing participants’ acceptability judgments and neural responses, the study explored how such linguistic innovations are gradually integrated into speakers’ mental grammar.

With regard to Formosan language research, several presentations focused on issues in syntax and phonology. One study investigated the syntactic properties of the interrogative “how” in Tsou and Saisiyat, demonstrating that these interrogative elements function as verbs and can introduce arguments, thereby playing a central role in clause structure. Another study examined the prosodic structure of the morpheme ay in Sakizaya and Amis, showing how different grammatical functions are reflected in distinct phonetic and phonological patterns, and further highlighting the interaction between syntax and prosody.

In the field of historical linguistics, researchers examined seventeenth-century overseas Southern Min documents to investigate the naming and semantic development of color terms in Southern Min. The study analyzed phenomena such as the coexistence of hong ‘red’ and chi ‘scarlet’, as well as the semantic differentiation among qing, lan, and lü (‘blue/green’), revealing patterns of lexical competition and change across different historical periods. Such research reconstructs the historical trajectory of language development through documentary evidence.

In response to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the symposium also featured a presentation by doctoral student Mao-chang Ku on the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in linguistic research. The talk discussed how AI tools can assist with language data processing and analysis, including part-of-speech tagging, syntactic analysis, and cross-linguistic comparison, as well as their potential applications in text transcription, generation, and translation for low-resource languages. In addition, Dr. Chiu-hsing Yeh, a postdoctoral researcher from the Department of English at National Chengchi University, shared her experience in “Licensing Management and Data Ethics across Multiple Corpus Sources: The Case of the Taiwan Hakka Corpus,” providing valuable insights into legal and ethical considerations in corpus construction.

Overall, the symposium facilitated the exchange of research findings and knowledge sharing, contributing to the advancement of linguistic education and research resources while raising awareness of linguistic diversity and minority language communities. These efforts align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), by promoting inclusive knowledge production and supporting the preservation and study of diverse linguistic communities.