The Pan’s Syntax Lab is a research team led by Prof Victor Junnan Pan based at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Our team mainly focuses on generative syntax, especially, the Minimalist Program. We also work on heritage language, language contact, minority and endangered languages (Sino-Tibetan), and, psycho and neurolinguistics under the formal syntactic theoretical framework. / 香港中文大學語言學及現代語言系潘俊楠教授帶領的句法團隊致力於生成句法學,尤其是最簡方案, 繼承語和語言接觸、少數民族語言和瀕危語言以及理論語言學框架下的心理和神經語言學等領域的研究。 / L’équipe de recherche dirigée par le professeur Victor Junnan Pan au sein du Département de Linguistique et de Langues Modernes à l’Université Chinoise de Hong Kong travaille sur la syntaxe générative, notamment, le Programme Minimaliste, les langues d’héritage, le contact linguistique, les langues minoritaires et en danger (sino-tibétaines), et, la psycho et la neurolinguistique dans le cadre théorique de la syntaxe formelle.
Xiangyu Li presented his poster “Revisit and derive Verb-Copying Constructions in Chinese uniformly by Form-Copy” at The Workshop on Theoretical East Asian Linguistics 14 (TEAL-14) held at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, from 2025 March 19 to 21.
Three team members successfully passed their PhD Topic Proposals! Chenghao Hu, Nominal Licensing and Its Mechanisms in Mandarin Chinese and Beyond; Xiangyu Li Copy Identification Mechanism at Narrow Syntax: from Strong Minimalist Thesis to Form-Copy; Zhongyang Yu, Head Movement and Cliticization: A Syntactic Approach.
PhD candidate Zetao Xu stays as invisiting student at the Department of Linguistics of Utrecht University, Netherlands, for six months. During his visiting period, Zetao works with his international joint-supervisor Prof Roberta D’Alessandro.
Zhongyang Yu presented the poster “Deriving Sogdian pronominal cliticization” at The 50th Incontro di Grammatica Generativa held at University of Padova in Italy from 2025 February 20 to 21.
On February 4, 2025, Professor Mamoru Saito (Notre Dame Seishin University) gave a talk titled “Discourse particles and selection: Implications for the model of syntax” for the research seminar at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He presented a new perspective on explaining the hierarchy of sentence-final particles, i.e. through their selectional properties and speech acts rather than fixed cartographical structure. He adopts a multi-dimensional derivation model initially proposed in Pan and Du (2024).