Chinese as a Second Language

Kecskes Istvan (1947–2025), Distinguished Professor at SUNY, was a highly influential scholar in pragmatics and bilingualism. He authored groundbreaking works, including Intercultural Pragmatics (2014) and English as a Lingua Franca (2019). He was also the esteemed founding editor of the journals Intercultural Pragmatics and Chinese as a Second Language Research. Zhao Yang is Boya Distinguished Professor and Dean of the School of Chinese as a Second Language at Peking University. He earned a PhD in Chinese linguistics from Cambridge. His work in SLA, generative grammar and sociolinguistics has yielded key publications. He holds leadership roles in Chinese and International language teaching and acquisition associations.

• 1. Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tone Eric Pelzl and Hang Zhang; 2. Prosody in Chinese as a second language Hana Třísková and Chunsheng Yang; 3. Chinese characters Xin Jiang; 4. Aspect Claire Saillard and Carlotta Sparvoli; 5. Modality: crosslinguistic and Chinese language specific features Carlotta Sparvoli and Lizhen Peng; 6. Chinese adjectives Chaofen Sun; 7. From theory to practice: exploring and the link between cognitive linguistics and Chinese vocabulary instruction Chiara Romagnoli and Huichen S. Hsiao; 8. Word order and syntactic structures Zhao Yang and Giorgio Francesco; 9. Formulaic language and speech acts Yongyi Wu and Istvan Kecskes; 10. Pragmatic competence Istvan Kecskes and Anqi Ding; 11. Cognitive linguistic approach to the development of Chinese as a second language Xu Wen and Alain Peyraube.