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Languages, Linguistics and Cultures

Hua Lin

Associate Professor

Linguistics, SLLC

Contact:
Office: CLE D347 250-721-6643
Credentials:
PhD
Area(s) of expertise:
phonetics, phonology, second language acquisition, Chinese linguistics

Hua Lin is a Associate Professor in the Linguistics section of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Victoria.

Bio

Dr. Hua Lin is a linguist whose research and teaching encompass theoretical phonology, phonetics, Chinese linguistics, and second-language phonetics and phonology. Her work integrates formal linguistic analysis with experimental and applied questions concerning speech production, perception, and language learning.

Dr. Lin is especially known for her research on Mandarin tone, tone sandhi, and neutral tone. Her Toneme Theory treats a tone as a structured sequence of time-bearing tonal units and provides a framework for analysing the internal temporal organization of Mandarin tones. Within this framework, she has developed proposals including Edge Toneme Truncation and the Low Tone Plateau Constraint, offering unified accounts of central Mandarin tone-sandhi patterns and the phonological status of neutral tone. Her work has helped bring modern phonological theory to bear on fundamental questions in Chinese linguistics. Elements of her theoretical account of Mandarin tone sandhi have also been taken up in engineering work on Mandarin text-to-speech synthesis.

Her current research develops a broader phonology of duration: an account of abstract temporal structure in phonology that is distinct from both phonetic duration and moraic weight. This work brings her long-standing research on tone and tone sandhi into dialogue with questions of rhythm, timing, laryngeal phonetics, and second-language speech. Most recently, she delivered the keynote address, “Toward a Phonology of Duration: What Mandarin Tone Sandhi Reveals About Temporal Structure,” at the Third International Symposium on Contemporary Phonology (July 2026), Xi’an International Studies University, Xi’an, China. Dr. Lin has also investigated how speakers’ first-language phonological systems shape the perception and production of English sounds, intonation, and rhythm, including cross-linguistic studies of speech rhythm and selected articulatory and acoustic research.

Dr. Lin is the author of Mandarin Tonology (1996) and A Grammar of Mandarin Chinese (2001). The latter has been used as a textbook in Chinese linguistics and language courses at universities in Canada, the United States, and Europe. She has also published articles and book chapters on Mandarin phonology, Chinese tone sandhi, neutral tone, Chinese dialect phonology, phonology–syntax interaction, and second-language speech. Her expertise in Chinese language and speech also led to her being featured in the Canadian documentary series Speaking in Tongues: The History of Language, which also featured Noam Chomsky and other leading scholars.

An active contributor to the international Chinese-linguistics community, Dr. Lin organized the Ninth North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics at the University of Victoria in 1997, at a time when direct contact between scholars in mainland China and North America was still scarce. The conference brought a large number of speakers from China to Canada. The event helped establish sustained international dialogue and collaboration in Chinese linguistics. She also served on the Executive Committee of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics.

At UVic, she has taught and supervised students in phonetics, phonology, second-language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, and contrastive linguistics. She has supervised undergraduate honours students as well as graduate students at both the master’s and doctoral levels.

Courses