PARECT

Gian Duri Rominger (Ph.D. candidate, East Asian Studies) will use his fellowship award to continue his work on the link between sound and meaning in ancient Chinese texts (c. 350 – 139 BCE). Currently, Rominger is compiling a dataset of puns, rhymes, alliterations, and other poetic structures in two texts, the Lüshi chunqiu and the Huainanzi. This dataset will play an important role in Rominger’s dissertation, which focuses on the overlap between sound and meaning in early Chinese texts. Moreover, he hopes that the dataset, once published, will contribute to the fields of intellectual and cultural history, as well as to future work on phonological reconstructions of Old Chinese, the oldest attested member of the Sino-Tibetan language family, as well as to historical linguistics more broadly.