Stephen Matthews (linguist)
Stephen Matthews () is a British linguist in Hong Kong. He is Co-Director of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His specialist areas include language typology, syntax and semantics. His current interests include the word order typology of Chinese; the grammar of Chinese languages, notably Cantonese, Chaozhou and other Minnan dialects; language contact and bilingualism, with particular reference to Sinitic languages. Career. Matthews received his BA in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Cambridge, and his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. In the 1990s, Matthews  began teaching at University of Hong Kong. He has also taught at the University of Melbourne and University of Paris. His published works often focus on Sinitic languages, including Cantonese and bilingualism in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus. The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus, which is reported in 2005 as the world's largest video-linked database of children becoming bilingual, created by Matthews and Yip, features 170 hours of audio and video files of four families raising their children bilingually in Cantonese and English. The project, which includes transcripts and searchable video and audio  segments, took 10 years to compile. This database is the basis of a book, "The Bilingual Child", written by Yip and Matthews and published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, which received the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2009. The database focuses on children who are bilingual in English and Cantonese and who learned to speak two languages through the one-parent, one-language approach. Personal life. Matthews is married to linguist Virginia Yip, and has three bilingual children. He is an amateur musician, playing second violin with the Hong Kong Chamber Orchestra and  the SAR Philharmonic. He is an academic signatory to the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt concerning the Shakespeare Authorship Question.