Happy Retirement, Jim!

Happy Retirement, Jim! 

On Wednesday April 24, our beloved faculty and legendary linguist C.-T. James "Jim" Huang taught his last class at Harvard University and announced his retirement. Jim decided to join the department in 2000 (as shown on the cake in the picture). In the past 23+ years, Jim has worked with us not only as a syntactician and Chinese linguist, but also a wonderful mentor and kind teacher.

Huang received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from National Taiwan Normal University in 1971 and 1974, respectively, and in 1982 he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT. He received the Linguistic Society of Taiwan's Lifetime Achievement award in 2014 and was elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2015. In 2016, he was elected an Academician in the Convocation of the Academia Sinica's division of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019 he was elected a Member of Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe).

Huang has published articles and books in both English in Mandarin Chinese within the generative grammar framework of linguistics, extensively on the structure of Mandarin Chinese grammar. His influence in the field is widely credited for "paving the way and leading the development of Chinese theoretical syntax"; "without his pioneering research [...] such a field would not exist in the rich way we presently know it". In 2015, Huang received a Festschrift comprising the work of 21 specialists in Chinese syntax, which is headlined by his own most recent publication on the subject of both synchronic and diachronic approaches to syntactic analyticity in Chinese parametric grammar.

Thank you so much, Jim, for all you have done for the field! It is our great pleasure to work with you! Enjoy your retirement with your family!