澳大新語 • 2023 UMAGAZINE 27 56 人物專訪 • EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW Sentences. He was awarded the prestigious title of Changjiang Distinguished Professor and was selected into the third batch of leading scholars in philosophy and social sciences in China’s Ten Thousand Talents Programme. Over the past century, academics outside China have considered linguistics a pilot field in the humanities. According to Prof Yuan, this is because linguistics research has been strongly influenced by natural science, which has given rise to a large number of interdisciplinary fields, such as mathematical linguistics, quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and pathological linguistics. As an old Chinese saying goes, ‘Without learning poetry, it is impossible to speak with elegance and fluency.’ This statement can also be applied to linguists: Without knowledge of natural science, you will not be fit to pursue research in linguistics. The Guiding Star of an Academic Career Prof Yuan’s encounter with natural science took place in 1981. He was barely 20 years old and working as a teacher at Qiandeng Middle School in Kunshan county, Jiangsu province. He borrowed the book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine from the school library and was fascinated by the concepts and arguments introduced by the author. In his master’s programme, he studied information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory. ‘From the literature, I learned about the nature of information, which helped me establish my way of thinking from the perspective of communication and control,’ he says. It was during this time that his passion for computation took root, and began to inspire his academic journey. During his PhD studies, Yuan participated in seminars on the philosophical foundation of artificial intelligence (AI). He also studied valency of nouns from the perspective of computational natural language understanding (In linguistics, valency is a measurement that describes the number of different noun phrases that can be governed by a verb, and has then been extended to adjectives and nouns). Moreover, Yuan immersed himself in Herbert Simon’s Reason in Human Affairs, which he read extensively. It was from this point that Yuan started to develop a conception of symbolic cognition. He explains that In early 2022, Yuan Yulin, a leading figure in linguistics at Peking University, joined the University of Macau (UM) to serve as a chair professor and the head of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature. In his new role, he was immediately impressed by the strong academic foundation of the department. ‘I believe that in time we will create a positive influence on the study of Chinese language and literature and will earn a good reputation in the academic community,’ he says. With over 30 years of experience in linguistics research, Prof Yuan believes there is a greater cause behind linguistics research: ‘The ultimate goal of linguistics research is to benefit humanity.’ Knowledge of Natural Science Crucial for Linguistics Research Prof Yuan’s academic journey has been inextricably linked to Chinese language and literature, the field in which he obtained his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees. After receiving his PhD from Peking University in 1990, he worked in the Departments of Chinese Language and Literature at both Peking University and Tsinghua University for a total of 25 years. Surprisingly, as a child, Yuan was interested in mechanical design and he dreamed of becoming an inventor and a mechanical designer, instead of a linguist. Because of his rural background and the particular generation to which he belonged, Yuan did not have the opportunity to pursue an education in science and technology. In 1978, he enrolled in Jiangsu Normal College-Suzhou to study linguistics, a branch of the humanities with a strong resemblance to natural science. For this reason, despite being a student in the humanities, he was able to learn theories and methods of natural science and apply them in linguistics research. ‘There is always a silver lining in life, and I feel my time was well spent over these years,’ says Prof Yuan modestly. Driven by his passion, Yuan studied hard and read widely, aiming to integrate his knowledge of linguistics and natural science. His research efforts in the studies of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics have earned him a prominent place in these fields. Today, he is the author of more than ten influential books, including Cognition-based Studies on Chinese Grammar, A Cognitive Investigation and Fuzzy Classification of Word-class in Mandarin Chinese, and Focal Structure and Semantic Interpretation of Chinese
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