Minqi Liu

刘敏旗 • [min.t͡ɕʰi] [ljou̯] • she/her

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UCLA Department of Linguistics
3125 Campbell Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
United States of America

I’m an ABD (all-but-dissertation) Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and also a member of the UCLA Language Acquisition Lab. I am primarily interested in first language (L1) acquisition and theoretical syntax. I employ experimental methods to address core issues in children’s syntactic development and believe that L1 data can inform linguistic theory in meaningful ways.

My recent research concerns how children acquire the syntactic constructions that involve extraction of a nominal phrase over another c-commanding nominal phrase, which usually triggers locality difficulties in child languages (‘Intervention Effects’). My dissertation project centers on the syntax and acquisition of passive constructions in Mandarin Chinese.

Besides Mandarin, I have also worked on San CristĂłbal Lachirioag Zapotec, an under-documented language spoken in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico, and Tonggu Gan, a non-Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in Jiangxi in south China.

Before entering the Ph.D. program at UCLA, I earned my B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University, China.

Recent:

Jan 2023 I gave a talk on Featural Relativized Minimality in Child Mandarin Passives at the LSA 2023 Annual Meeting with Victoria Mateu and Nina Hyams.
Nov 2022 I gave a talk on Intervention effects in Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of passives at the 47th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 47) with Victoria Mateu and Nina Hyams. I received a Paula Menyuk Travel Award ($350) for this trip. Here are our slides and a pre-print version of our conference paper.
Jul 2022 A paper co-authered by me, Nina Hyams, and Victoria Mateu was published in the inaugural issue of Tsinghua Linguistics, entitled The syntax and acquisition of Mandarin sluice-like constructions. (pre-print version)
Jul 2022 I received a Dissertation Year Fellowship ($20,000) by UCLA.
Mar 2022 I received a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant ($15,001) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for my dissertation project Intervention Effects in the Acquisition of Passives (with faculty PI Prof. Nina Hyams).