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. I am supervised by Dr Marieke Meelen 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, or you would like to see any writings or slides that are not linked.

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 (POS) 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. Our team has recently published a new POS annotation manual for Classical Tibetan, which is the culmination of many years and many hands working on improving the efficacy and accuracy of Classical Tibetan POS tags, in order to facilitate further downstream parsing.

I also do some work on language documentation and revitalisation. As part of my PhD, I plan to do fieldwork on Humla Tibetan, spoken in the mountains in Nepal. My fieldwork data will not only contribute to my PhD, but also to an ongoing project at the University of Cambridge that creates digital resources for minority languages. We have so far built a language app for Dzardzongke Tibetan spoken in Nepal, aimed at fostering Dzardzongke-language literacy in its speakers, and teaching the language and culture to Dzardzongke diaspora communities. We are presenting this work at the Association for Computational Linguistics conference in San Diego in July 2026.

theoretical morphology

I also work 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 often involve a combination of concatenative and non-concatenative exponents, where exponents for one inflectional form may involve several discontinuous parts in a single verb form, and/or overlap with exponents of another inflectional form; and also b) multitudinous inflectional classes. These two aspects present great challenges for decompositional analysis. I discuss synchronic and diachronic aspects of these phenomena in my MPhil, and at the time presented analyses from Paradigm Morphology perspectives. I am now working on developing decompositional formal analyses for these phenomena, working in Nanosyntax. I am excited to be presenting some of this work in the summer of 2026, including at the ‘DM Meets Nano’ workshop in Brno. Through this work, I have been thinking a lot about whether the lexicalisation algorithm of Nanosyntax can derive discontinuous and overlapping exponence ‘for free’, and about what Nanosyntacic diachrony would look like. I look forward to working more on these problems.