I am a linguist specializing in a subfield of linguistics known as “formal semantics”. Semantics is the study of the patterns in the meaning of human language – how we combine words into meaningful sentences and understand each other in everyday conversations. The “formal” aspect involves using tools from mathematics and logic (such as set theory, functions and calculus) to establish a model of those patterns. To those without a background in theoretical linguistics, the combination of language and mathematics may sound very unusual. I would’ve found it hard to believe myself if someone were to tell me ten years ago that I would end up pursuing a career that deals with this combination – I had always known that language is my thing, but nobody could’ve convinced me that mathematics would become part of my profession.
I was born and raised in the city of Jinan in North China. Perhaps because of my mother’s interest, we had a lot of DVD sets of classic Hollywood/European epics at home – The Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, the Sissi trilogy, to name just a few. I watched them over and over, and dreamed of traveling to those countries and talking to those characters myself. With such strong curiosity about foreign cultures, language naturally became my favorite subject at school – at one point I even thought of becoming a simultaneous interpreter (one of the few language-related professions that I knew of back then). I went to college in Australia at the Australian National University. As a typical humanities kid, I took full advantage of the flexibility of my program and had the opportunity of enrolling in classes of sociology, history, politics, philosophy and linguistics. Among these fields, I found linguistics to be the most intuitive subject, and believed that this might be something that I would be good at. After passing my Japanese proficiency test, I decided to go to Japan for a MA degree in linguistics.
My initial encounter with formal semantics happened in my first year at Kyoto University in a class on modality (e.g. expressions like “must”, “can”, “may”) and conditionals (e.g. sentences in the form “if…then…”) taught by Magdalena Kaufmann, who was then on a research visit in Kyoto. I was completely lost most time of the class – I hadn’t touched math a bit since high school, and the mere sight of mathematical symbols was just overwhelming. But for some reason that still remains a mystery to me today (perhaps I was too ashamed that I didn’t understand a thing), I decided to go over the course materials again after the semester was over. The second attempt proved to be successful – after working through all the handouts, exercises and solutions, everything started to make sense and I even wanted to learn more. Eight years later, I finished my PhD study at University of Connecticut, where I was supervised by Magda Kaufmann and submitted a dissertation on Japanese modality and conditionals. Soon after, I was fortunate to join Osaka University as a formal semanticist.
One of my biggest lessons from studying formal semantics is that one doesn’t grow just by doing things that they are good at. Today, I’m still enthusiastic about languages – currently on a 110-day streak of German on Duolingo. But I’ve also become willing to taking up challenges by exploring things that I once thought I would never become interested in – a newbie in statistics this semester, but who knows what’s to come next.