Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng (simplified Chinese: 郑礼珊; traditional Chinese: 鄭禮珊; pinyin: Zhèng Lǐshān; born 1962) is a linguist with specialisation in theoretical syntax. She is a Chair Professor of Linguistics and Language at the Department of Linguistics, Leiden University, and one of the founding members of the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition.
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Academic life
After completing her BA and MA degree at the University of Toronto, Cheng obtained her PhD in 1991 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with Noam Chomsky. From 1991 to 2000, she held a position at the University of California, Irvine, first as an assistant professor, then as an associate professor (with tenure), before moving to Leiden University. In 2012, she was nominated for the Regional Chair at the University of Nantes (France), where she was appointed for two years and lectured on East Asian Linguistics.
Cheng has done extensive work on theoretical syntax, mostly from a comparative perspective, with the majority of her work concentrating on Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, and Min) and Bantu languages (Zulu, Chichewa, Bemba). Important contributions of her work to syntactic theory include her “Clause Typing Hypothesis” (Cheng 1991), which led to a better understanding of the nature of triggers of operations in syntax and the role that sentence-final particles play in the triggering system. Her work on bare nouns and classifiers in Chinese languages (e.g., Cheng & Sybesma 1999) demonstrates that the count-mass distinction is also relevant in Chinese languages, albeit in the system of classifiers. Furthermore, this work has argued that bare nouns can have hidden structures, and that classifiers can be associated with definiteness. Cheng's joint work on Zulu with Laura J. Downing (Cheng & Downing 2009, 2016) is a rare example of collaboration between a syntactician and a phonologist, demonstrating the necessity as well as benefits of such collaboration to the field. Importantly, it shows that prosodic phrasing in a language provides evidence for the syntactic structure of the language, work that she has continued in investigating Mandarin (Gryllia et al. 2020).