C.-T. James Huang

C.T. James Huang is a Taiwanese-American linguist. He is an emeritus professor of linguistics at Harvard University.

Early life and education

Huang was born in the small township of Fuli, Hualien, in Taiwan. He graduated from National Taiwan Normal University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1971 and a Master of Arts in 1974. He then completed doctoral studies in the United States on a Fulbright fellowship, earning his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. He wrote his doctoral dissertation, "Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar," under linguists Noam Chomsky and Kenneth L. Hale.

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.
Huang has published articles and books in both English and 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 2009, Huang collaborated with Y.-H. Audrey Li and Yafei Li to co-author a Cambridge Syntax Guide spanning the work of the past 25 years in theoretical Chinese syntax. 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.
On 24 April 2024, Huang announced his retirement after teaching for 45 years.