Jiyuan Zhou

周芨园 [ʈʂoʊ55 tɕi35 ɥɛn35] (she/her)

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Hi there! I’m a second-year PhD student in Linguistics at University of South Carolina, advised by Lewis Esposito. My research interests center on language and gender. I’m broadly interested in how gender is expressed, perceived, and processed through language. I enjoy exploring these questions from different perspectives and drawing on whatever methods best suit the question at hand. My current work brings together approaches from sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, and I’m always excited to expand my methodological toolkit.

I received my MA in Language Studies, specializing in Corpus Linguistics from City University of Hong Kong (2024), where I was advised by Aini Li and Jackie Yan-Ki Lai. My master’s thesis used dependency parsing to examine gendered patterns in adjectives modifying gendered nouns in Chinese corpora. After graduating, I worked as a research assistant there and later at Centre for Research on Chinese Language and Education (CRCLE) at The Education University of Hong Kong.

You can reach me at jiyuan.zhou@sc.edu.

news

Jul 2026 We submitted X0-internal Codeswitching Exists: Evidence from Mandarin–English Bilinguals to International Journal of Bilingualism.
Jun 2026 Our paper, Perception and social evaluation of gendered adjective-noun combinations in Mandarin, was published in Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America.
Apr 2026 A project I participated in launched the Sino-Tibetan Database of Language Splits (漢藏語分化時間數據庫), a digital tool for studying language divergence and migration.
Jan 2026 I presented a talk titled “Perception and social evaluation of gendered adjective-noun combinations in Mandarin” at LSA2026 Annual Meeting.

selected publications

  1. PLSA
    Perception and social evaluation of gendered adjective-noun combinations in Mandarin
    Jiyuan Zhou and Aini Li
    Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2026
    DOI Bib HTML