Kitty Wenying Liu

I am a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. I work on historical linguistics, and my PhD project looks at the diachrony of clause chaining in Tibetic languages. I began my PhD in October 2025, and my research is funded by the Cambridge Trust.

You can contact me at wl399 [at] cam [dot] ac [dot] uk .

Please do drop me an email if you want to talk about any of my work, you would like to see any writings or slides that are not linked, or if any external links on this site are broken.

Research interests and current projects

diachrony

I am interested in how language changes over time, and in the interactivity between changes across different linguistic domains. My research so far has focused on the diachrony of Tibetic langauges.

For my PhD project, I am studying the diachronic development of clause chaining between the Old Tibetan period and present-day Tibetic languages. Clause-chaining sits at the interface of discourse, syntax, and morphology, and is often discussed as a kind of ‘intermediate’ phenomenon between coordination and subordination. In Tibetic languages specifically, the clause-chaining system interacts with clausal nominalisation, the case / postposition system, and possibly switch reference.

In my undergraduate and MPhil work, I examined diachronic phenomena which exhibited interactions between phonetics and phonology, and phonology and morphology. I am currently working to extend my MPhil thesis on Tibetic verbal morphophonology by applying formal frameworks - please see the ‘theoretical morphology’ section below.

linguistic corpora and fieldwork

As an extension of and complement to doing historical linguistics on a lesser-studied and low-resource language family, I also work on creating language resources for Tibetic languages.

I am part of the team making the first part-of-speech tagged diachronic corpus of written Tibetan, as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘The Emergence of Egophoricity’, which investigates the emergence of ‘ego’ perspective marking in Tibetan and Newar.

I also do some work on language documentation and revitalisation. [something about collecting data on Humla Tibetan] I am also part of [short description of Dzardzongke and Humla language app projects]

theoretical morphology

I am also working on / would like to spend more time working on non-concatenative morphology in Tibetic languages. Verbal morphology in Old and Classical Tibetan - and conservative modern-day varieties to a lesser extent - exhibit a) complex paradigm patterns that can simultaneously involve different kinds of concatenative and non-concatenative exponence, and b) multitudinous inflectional classes, which present great challenges for formal accounts. I discuss synchronic and diachronic aspects of these phenomena in my MPhil, and present some analyses from Paradigm Morphology perspectives. I am currently working on developing further analyses for these phenomena in Nanosyntax. This is very much a work in progress, but I am very excited for directions this could lead to.