This book contains new research essays of linguistic interface studies in or related to East Asian languages. Written by 14 colleagues or former students of Yoshihisa Kitagawa, it is also a book paying tribute to his decades of scholarships on linguistic interface studies. The chapters therein range from interface studies in syntax and other linguistic areas such as morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition, language evolution, and language faculty science. The languages under discussion are mainly East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but also include Jordanian Arabic and Spanish, under comparative studies with respect to East Asian languages. The book appeals to both seasoned and novice researchers in linguistics, East Asian languages, and modern languages.

Chapters “Impersonal Bei Sentences in Early Mandarin: Form and Function”, “Focus Inside: Evidence from Spanish and Chinese”, and “Recursive Focus Prosody” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

Jen Ting is a Professor of English and Linguistics in the Department of English at National Taiwan Normal University. Her research, which utilizes cross-linguistic and experimental data in syntax and morphology, has been featured in journals such as Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Language and Linguistics, Linguistics, Syntax, The Linguistic Review, and Taiwan Journal of Linguistics, among others. In addition to her research, she has contributed significantly to the academic community, serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Scopus/THCI-indexed journal Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, and as a member of the Executive Committee for both the Linguistic Society of Taiwan (2010-2011) and the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (2013-2015).

Yu-Yin Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Chinese linguistics in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research includes syntactic interfaces of information structure, focus prosody, natural language processing, and technology and language education. Her recent work has been published in journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Knowledge-Based Systems, Language and Linguistics, PlosONE, ReCALL, System, and International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. She has served as a reviewer for journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Phonetics, Computer Assisted Language Learning, Frontiers in Language Sciences, Lingua, Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, and Lingua Sinica.