PhD or MPhil Study

CBS's postgraduate degree programme leads to a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) or Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree. The programme aims to provide rigorous training to students who aspire to become researchers or scholars capable of conducting original research independently, and to produce research findings that are significant within their fields of specialization. Our research students will be equipped with the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to conceptualize and carry out an original, substantive, empirically grounded and rigorous piece of investigative work.

The major research areas available at CBS are as follows:

Applied linguistics, including Bilingualism, Corporate Communication, Language Assessment, and Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

Comparative discourse studies, glocalisation and multilingual media communication in Greater China

Contrastive approaches to foreign language learning, learner tools creation & evaluation, intercultural mediation

Language and communication studies, including corporate communication theories, strategies and processes, with special reference to Greater China (兩岸四地)

Language policy and language planning, sociolinguistic issues of multilingualism, bilingual interaction, bilingual education and instructed second language learning, interlanguage, cross-linguistic influence

Multilingualism, language learning and use in multilingual societies, plurilingual language development, Chinese pedagogical grammar, contrastive grammar of Chinese and other languages

Chinese and East Asian Linguistics

Cantonese linguistics/grammar, Chinese dialect studies, language and society in Greater China, history of the Chinese language

Chinese language curriculum, pedagogy and assessment

Chinese language education, teaching Chinese for specific purposes

Chinese lexical semantics, metaphors and linguistic ontology

Chinese morphology, syntax and pragmatics

Chinese phonetics and phonology

Japanese linguistics and Korean linguistics, including but not limited to: second/foreign language learning by advanced learners of Japanese/Korean, comparative linguistics, discourse analysis, language typology, profiling of registers, systemic functional linguistic theory and description

Sinographic orthography and Chinese lexicology

Varieties of Chinese, language contact and language change, linguistic variation

Computational and Corpus Linguistics

Chinese language processing, language resources, crowdsourcing

Computational lexical semantics, ontology-lexicon interface, computer-assisted language learning, machine translation and machine-assisted translation, computer processing of non-literal meaning, including irony, metaphor, sarcasm, and synaesthesia, digital humanities featuring the use of NLP technologies in the humanities

Corpus-based approaches to linguistics and linguistic theories in language technology

Speech and multimedia corpus design and research

Neuro-cognitive Studies of Language and Clinical Linguistics

Development, morphological awareness and reading development

Developmental dyslexia: diagnosis, assessment and treatment, reading and writing development, profiling of syntactic development

Language acquisition and psycholinguistics, second language acquisition (SLA), reading acquisition and development

Neurolinguistics (ERP, fMRI), psycholinguistics, speech production and perception, speech motor control of lexical tones, tonal perception and production, perception of tones by people with amusia, neuro-cognitive studies of bilingualism, conversation and other linguistic acts

Translation and Interpreting Studies

Interpreting studies: assessment of interpreting quality, perception of interpreting performance, pedagogy of interpreting, court interpreting, community interpreting, simultaneous interpreting, and corpus-based interpreting studies

Theories of translation, empirical studies of translation, neuro-cognitive approaches to translation studies