Alain Peyraube

Directeur de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Paris), Directeur d’Etudes of Chinese Linguistics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris), and director of the Collegium de Lyon.

Alain Peyraube received his Ph.D. from Paris 8 University in 1976 and his Doctorat d’Etat from Paris 7 University in 1984. Research Fellow at the CNRS since 1975, he has been Director from 1984 to 1998 of the Institute of East Asian Linguistics (CNRS and EHESS). He served as President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics and as President of the European Association of Chinese Studies. He has been Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at Cornell University (Hu Shih Chair), at the University of California at Santa Barbara, at the Hong Kong Baptist University, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Peking, at the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, at La Trobe University in Australia.

He is Distinguished member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences , corresponding member of the Academia Sinica of Taiwan, Honorary Professor at the University of Beijing, and Adjunct Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

As specialist in Chinese historical syntax and linguistic typology of Sinitic languages, A. Peyraube has authored five books and more than a hundred of articles on Chinese studies and mainly on Chinese linguistics. His latest research has been done within a broadly functional and cognitive framework in a cross-linguistic perspective.

Some of his recent publications are the chapter on Ancient Chinese in the Encyclopaedia of the World’s Ancient Languages (Cambridge University Press), articles on Languages and Genes in China and on the cognitive approaches of the expression of Space in Medieval and Modern Chinese.