Introducing Wang Li

Focusing on the life and works of Wang Li, one of the founding figures of modern Chinese linguistics, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to his scholarship. It presents Wang Li as a pioneering linguist whose research ranged across grammar, phonology and phonetics, historical linguistics, dialectology, pedagogy, and prosody, and shows how he integrated traditional Chinese philology with modern linguistic science.

The book first sketches Wang Li’s life through a concise biography from his birth in 1900 to his passing in 1986, highlighting key moments in his intellectual development and professional career. It then introduces his major contributions across different research areas, explaining their significance to the study of the Chinese language.

This volume is an essential resource for students and researchers of Chinese linguistics, as well as for readers seeking an accessible entry point to one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century.

Bo Wang is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is the co-author of Lao She’s Teahouse and Its Two English Translations (2020), Translating Tagore’s Stray Birds into Chinese (2021), Systemic Functional Translation Studies (2021), Introducing M.A.K. Halliday (2022), Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics (2022), and Introducing Chinese Discourse (2025).

Tianqi Ma is a doctoral student in Linguistics at the University of Macau. She is an experienced song translator who has rendered over 50 songs into singable forms. Her research centres on Chinese–English singable song translation, with particular attention to the musicality of language and its integration with musical structures. Her broad research interests include sound symbolism, creativity in translation practice, human-centred augmented machine translation, and audiovisual translation.

Yuanyi Ma is currently a researcher at the Faculty of Education, Vancouver Island University, Canada. She is the co-editor of Key Themes and New Directions in Systemic Functional Translation Studies (2022) and Theorizing and Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics (2024). She and Bo Wang are translators of Modern Chinese Grammar (2023) and A History of Chinese Grammar (forthcoming) by Professor Wang Li.