JCL, 45 Years on

JCL, 45 Years on Shengli Feng and Virginia Yip Dear friends of JCL, It is a pleasure for the two of us to address the readers of Journal of Chinese Linguistics (JCL) as editors. We are honored to have been invited by Professor William S-Y. Wang to serve as editors of JCL starting January 2019. JCL was first initiated at the University of California at Berkeley in 1973 by Professor Wang who has served as Editor Extraordinaire since the inception and has grown and flourished, entering its 46th year in 2019. From 1973 to 2018, JCL has published 95 issues with over 500 articles, as well as 28 monographs. At the time of writing (31 December 2018), it was one of two journals in the SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, together with 2 other journals based in Hong Kong, 2 based in mainland China and two based in Taiwan. The global reach of JCL is indicated by subscriptions from more than 40 countries. JCL is well recognized as the first international journal where research on Chinese languages and related fields with cross-disciplinary perspectives was systematically introduced and published, with methodology ranging from comparative, experimental, historical reconstruction to longitudinal case studies. It is with humility that we take up the baton Professor Wang handed over to us at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to Professor Wang and pay collective tribute to him for his profound impact and enduring contributions to the field on this special occasion. Without his exemplary leadership and indefatigable dedication through the decades, JCL would not have made so many significant contributions and nurtured so many scholars who have become leaders in the field. We are grateful that Professor Wang will serve as Honorary Editor of JCL from 2019 onwards. [End Page iii] On numerous occasions, Prof. Wang has reiterated that JCL has inherited the legacy of Professor Y.R. Chao and Professor Fang-Kuei Li and it is thanks to Prof. Wang that he created an unprecedented new epoch by establishing JCL as an international platform to benefit generations of scholars. We are also grateful to have had the support of a stellar cast of distinguished Co-editors (Shen Zhongwei and Shi Feng ) and Associate Editors: Robert S. Bauer , Hilary Chappell , Matthew Y. Chen , Chin-Chuan Cheng , Chu-Ren Huang , Jingxia Lin , Tsu-Lin Mei , Alain Peyraube , Shen Jiaxuan , James H-Y. Tai , Ovid J. L. Tzeng , Wang Feng . A special thanks goes to Yifeng Wu for serving as Managing Editor of JCL for the last 21 years and making significant contributions to its smooth and successful daily operation. We take the opportunity to thank each and every one of the JCL team for their dedication and support over the years. Our vision is to carry on the fine scholarship and traditions of JCL as envisioned by Prof. Wang and promote interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to Chinese linguistics. In the words of Prof Wang which articulate a broad vision of the field: … We have papers on the Han dialects as well as on the languages of the ethnic minorities. Some papers are strongly theoretical, while others emphasize an experimental or computational orientation. While most of the discussion has centered around spoken language, there is also concern with our unique morphosyllabic writing system. There are papers in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics. After all, language is an activity that pervades every aspect of human life. It is natural that the study of language should be broadly based and that it should draw from many disciplines. The term "Chinese Linguistics" in our IACL has several interpretations. Among these, one reading has to do with the traditions, theories and results of linguistics and philology as practiced by Chinese scholars past and present. Another reading has to do with the application of the methods of general linguistics to the languages found in China. This would include, of course, research on many non-Sinitic languages, such as Altaic, Austric, Tibeto-Burman, etc., especially on their interactions with the Han dialects. After all, China is a Sprachbund in the full sense of...