Biography

Marinus van den Berg, was born in 1942 and after military service which brought him to Surinam and his first contacts with Chinese (Hakka) speakers, studied Chinese Language and Literature at Leiden University, under professors A.F.P. Hulsewé and Eric Zürcher, graduating in 1971, and taking up the position of professor in Chinese linguistics. Already in 1968 he became responsible, as student assistant, for the organization of Chinese teaching in the then just established Leiden University language laboratory and teaching of Chinese remained part of the job description thereafter.

He obtained his Ph.D. with the title “Language Planning and Language Use in Taiwan: a study of language choice behaviour in public settings” in 1985. This study was based on extensive fieldwork in Taiwan in 1977-78, made possible by a generous grant of the then ‘Netherlands Organization for the advancement of pure research’ (ZWO), currently known as the ‘Organization for scientific research’ (NWO), which grant included participation in the 1977 Linguistic Institute, then held at the University of Hawaii, Manoa campus. This summer course gave him access to various teachers in the new field of Sociology of Language, and inspired his further work in the field. Particular support was provided by the late professor Robert Cooper, who taught at the Linguistic Institute then and provided valuable comments and support during the fieldwork in Taiwan.

Work in the field of Chinese language teaching had made clear that great confusion existed around the use and interpretation of the Chinese particle le. To address this issue, a special project was started on the uses and cognitive function of the Chinese particle le, done together with professor Wu Guo from the University of Western Sydney, Australia, and supported by both ZWO and the Australian National Research Council. The end product was published by Routledge under the tile “The Chinese particle Le : discourse construction and pragmatic marking in Chinese”, in 2006, and contains a proposal for a context-sensitive analysis of the particle le as a marker of ‘deviation’ and its counterpart ‘solutionhood’.

Since 2005, Marinus became the director of the international research project “Urbanization, language contact, and identity formation in China and Europe” (ilci.iias.asia), and as part of that project was involved in research in the People’s Republic of China as research professor at several Chinese universities, notably Fudan University, Shanghai, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Shanghai University, Shenzhen University, Nanjing University, and Jilin University.  All courses combined theory with actual practice of collecting data, coding, and processing, and these data are the source of several of the publications listed in the bibliography.

For the 2007 conference see:

https://www.fryske-akademy.nl/ilci/sites/default/files/Program_seminar.pdf