Keith Dede

Associate Professor of Chinese

department: Foreign Languages
office: Miller Center
phone: 503-768-7445
e-mail: dede@lclark.edu

Keith Dede joined the Lewis & Clark faculty as Assistant Professor of Chinese in 2001. In 2007 he earned the rank Associate Professor and became the Chair of the East Asian Studies program. He received his doctorate in Asian Languages and Literatures from the University of Washington with a dissertation analyzing an ongoing change in the syntax of the Xining dialect of Qinghai, China. He teaches courses in general linguistics, Standard Chinese language and Chinese literature, including “Bones to Blossoms,” a history of Chinese literature in translation from the earliest writings to the medieval period. His publications include studies of the Chinese dialects of Qinghai from a sociolinguistic, historical linguistic and dialectological perspective. Two recent publications are, “The Deep End of the Feature Pool: Syntactic hybridization in Chinese dialects” (Journal of Chinese Linguistics 35.1) and “Standard Chinese and the Xining dialect: the rise of an interdialectal standard” (Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 16:2). His current research includes an analysis of the structure of the Xining dialect’s verb phrase and influence of Tibetan and Mongolic languages on the history of the dialect.