Professor James H-Y. Tai (戴浩一), a native of Lukang, Taiwan, is Adjunct Professor in OSU’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL). A former faculty member in DEALL, Professor Tai taught Chinese linguistics during 1986-1995, with his first year as a visiting professor. While at OSU, he advised two M.A. theses and twelve Ph.D. dissertations, in addition to serving on other theses and dissertations in DEALL and in Linguistics. In addition, he was the senior founding member of the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL) in 1989, returning to OSU as our special guest speaker to celebrate NACCL’s 30th anniversary (https://u.osu.edu/naccl30).

Even after leaving OSU, Professor Tai had served as an adjunct faculty member on one M.A. thesis and has helped other DEALL graduate students in their research. His fondness for DEALL can also be seen in his establishment of an endowment, a James H-Y. Tai Buckeye East Asian Linguistics Fund in DEALL in 2018, as well as in making the initial donation in 2020 for the establishment of the Cantonese Gamluhk Fund to support DEALL’s offering of conversational Cantonese. In 2023, DEALL edited a Festschrift for Professor Tai as Volume 6 of the Buckeye East Asian Linguistics series, published as open access by OSU Libraries’ Knowledge Bank.

Professor Tai has over half a century of service in academia, starting with his position as an Assistant Professor at Southern Illinois University in 1970, immediately after graduating in Linguistics from Indiana University. After almost a decade in DEALL at OSU, he was invited back to Taiwan in 1995 to establish the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Chung Cheng University and served that institute as its inaugural director. At Chung Cheng, he also held positions as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts (1998-2002), and the university’s Vice President (2009), as well as Director (and founder) of The Taiwan Center for Sign Linguistics (2016-2017), and Co-Director of the Center for Innovative Research on Aging Society (2018-2023).

Beyond his institution, his commitment to academia included serving as Director-General of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Taiwan National Science Council (2002-2005), President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (2004). Over the decades, Professor Tai has served on a number of editorial boards of academic journals, including as Associate Editor of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics (1976- ), Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (1987-1994), and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chinese Language Teaching (2011-2017).

Professor Tai's early linguistic research was in the area of Chinese syntax/pragmatics. Since his return to Taiwan, he had extended into cognitive linguistics, sign linguistics, and issues pertaining to language and aging, three research areas that have been generously supported by prestigious government grants. His research interests are also reflected in his extensive presentations since 1969, and publications since 1971, thus spanning over half century of groundbreaking, influential scholarship, with 7 monographs and close to 100 solo and co-authored articles. Today, in his 80s, sporting the mantra of “Use it or lose it,” Professor Tai is still very energetically and enthusiastically seeking knowledge and sharing it with the world.