Greater Oxford Area
I am a professional linguist and I do academic research in linguistics, specifically formal syntax. I have expertise and training in Indo-European, Latin, Greek, Romance (Spanish) and East Asian languages, namely Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), and I have worked on Copulas/Clefts and Differential Object Marking (DOM) in these languages. My theoretical persuasion is Chomskyan and I have analysing formal syntactic change within different versions Chomsky’s Minimalist Programme (1995 et seq). For my PhD, I am investigating frequency effects in different types of grammaticalization and their differential rates of weakening (cf Zipf’s law). My investigation of diachronic frequency involves systematic coding of lexemes and statistical analysis of collostructional frequencies for which I have mainly employed R to perform concordance and mathematical representation. I am also trained in SPSS and Python and have used them for corpus analysis. Other than my academic research, I am a simultaneous interpreter and language teacher and I have taught mainly Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) in the UK. I am also a regular contributor at Asia Times, The Conversation and Vox.com. Moreover, I am a data scientist and if you need help and advice with planning or completing data/statistical projects, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
I launched a group called Independent Linguists Meet that consisted of linguists at the Ronin Institute and the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE). Our first meeting took place online on 6th June 2025 and we have been meeting regularly on a weekly basis where we have held discussions on different sub-fields of Linguistics based on our members’ past, ongoing and future work. At the inaugural meeting (6th June 2025), the following presentation was presented on my origins and developments as a linguist: https://youtu.be/EwOAl2GhjTA .
As the end of 2023, I was informed that I had been promoted to Research Scholar at IGDORE, which is reflected on the membership page of our website: www.igdore.org/researchers .
I joined the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education (IGDORE) as their affiliated Researcher-In-Training and have pursued my research in Linguistics under their tutelage and support. I also share and endorse their advocacy for Open Science and Access to all scholarship and am keen to promote scholarly practices for making academic research openly accessible for all. Since 2022, I have been made a full Researcher on a par with all my fellow members at IGDORE.
I initially joined as a signatory of the petition calling Stanford University to revoke their decision to eliminate the only full-time position of Cantonese teaching. As our campaign grew and our goal developed into promoting Cantonese education globally, I became involved in various aspects of Save Cantonese. I have translated numerous public notices and announcements from English to Cantonese and Mandarin and vice versa, served as a consultant on Chinese, specifically Cantonese, (socio)linguistics, and published an op-ed on Asia Times Online about the importance and significance of Cantonese education in the West which can be found here: https://asiatimes.com/2021/04/importance-of-teaching-cantonese-at-us-universities/ . A summary of my experience and impression of Save Cantonese can be found here: https://ronininstitute.org/save-cantonese-language-advocacy-for-a-project-to-preserve-cantonese-in-the-west/8176/ . Since 2024, I have been involved in the organisation of events and communication with external scholars who have taken an interest in Save Cantonese. Here is an interview I did in which I gave my perspectives on the state and future of Save Cantonese: https://www.savecantonese.org/blog/volunteer-spotlight-keith-tse .
I joined the University of York in September 2014 as a postgraduate research student and am now doing doctoral research at the Department of Linguistics and Language Sciences on formal syntax. My academic publications can be found on my academic webpage: https://sites.google.com/alumni.york.ac.uk/kkt503 .
During my time at York, I have been teaching Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) to students at the University of York.