Wei Wang
Assistant Professor

6049 Agnes Arnold Hall
Phone: (713) 743-3070
Email: wwang58@central.uh.edu
Personal website

Bio

Dr. Wang’s research consists of three main lines, language use in social interaction, second language acquisition, and bilingual development. Her first line of work draws on conversation analysis and functional linguistics to investigate how linguistic forms are used by speakers as resources to accomplish various social actions and achieve their interactional goals. Her second line of research concerns second language learners’ development of interactional competence, i.e. speakers’ ability to organize social interactions—such as opening a conversation, repairing, and complaining—in mutually intelligible manners. Lastly, Dr. Wang is interested in bilingualism and bilingual development of school-age children, in particular, code-switching, and seeks to provide linguistic minority parents with insights on developmentally appropriate language input at home.

Education

• Ph.D. in Chinese Linguistics, UCLA
• M.Phil. in Linguistics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
• B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University, China

Selected publications

• Wang, Wei. 2021. “Pursuing common ground: Nondisaffiliative rhetorical questions in Mandarin conversations.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 54(4): 355-373.
• Wang, Wei. 2021. “Question-response system in Mandarin conversation.” Pragmatics 31(4): 589-616.
• Wang, Wei. 2020. “Grammatical conformity in question-qnswer sequences: The case of meiyou in Mandarin conversation.” Discourse Studies 22(5): 610–631.
• Wang, Wei, & Hongyin, Tao. 2019. “From matrix clause to turn expansion The emergence of wo juede ‘I feel/think’ in Mandarin conversational interaction.” In Maschler et al. (eds.), Emergent Syntax for Conversation: Clausal Patterns and the Organization of Action. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
• Wang, Wei. 2018. “Discourse uses and prosodic properties of ranhou in spontaneous Mandarin conversation.” Chinese Language and Discourse 9 (1): 1-25.
• Wang, Wei. 2017. “From a conditional marker to a discourse marker: The use of dehua 的话 in natural Mandarin conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 117: 119–138.
• Wang, Wei. 2016. “Prosody and discourse functions of ranhou 然后: With implications for teaching Mandarin conjunctions at the discourse level.” In H. Tao (ed.), Integrating Chinese Linguistic Research and Language Teaching and Learning, 145-167. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
• Wang, Wei. 2015. “The semantic map of the spatial domain and related functions.” Language and Linguistics 16 (3): 465-500.