Jianwei Yan · 阎建玮

Jianwei Yan · 阎建玮

Assistant Prefessor
Zhejiang University

About Me

I am an assistant professor at the School of International Studies, Zhejiang University. My research centers on the quantitative study of human language, combining large-scale corpus methods with frameworks from Quantitative Linguistics and Linguistic Typology. Empirically, I focus on three interconnected areas: the cross-linguistic patterns of morphology and syntax, the dynamic development of language proficiency in second language learners, and the quantitative practices of digital humanities. My work has appeared in Вопросы Языкознания (Voprosy Jazykoznanija), Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, Linguistic Analysis, Glottometrics, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Studia Linguistica, Linguistics Vanguard, and other international venues.

Email: yanjianwei@aliyun.com ; jwyan@zju.edu.cn

Research Focus

  • Quantitative Linguistics
  • Linguistic Typology
  • Second Language Development
  • Digital Humanities

Selected Publications

2025

  • Bao, Minna; Yan, Jianwei & Huang, Dabhurbayar. (2025). "Zipf's Law for Discourse Markers in Spoken Mongolian." Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. 32(2), 166-180.

  • Liu, Siqi; Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Haitao. (2025). "The complexity trade-off between morphological richness and word order freedom in Romance languages." Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie. 141(2), 323-349.

  • Yan, Jianwei & Chen, Heng. (2025). "Modeling the law of abbreviation in classical, modern, and ChatGPT-generated Chinese." Proceedings of QUASY, SyntaxFest 2025. 56-62.

  • Li, Qidi & Yan, Jianwei. (2025). "Humanities data in R: exploring networks, geospatial data, images, and text (Review)." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

  • Yan, Jianwei & Chen, Yixi. (2025). "Tracing the shapes of adventure: a subject-based interpretation of emotional arcs." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 40(3), 986-1002.

  • Dai, Zheyuan & Yan, Jianwei. (2025). "Discourse markers' role in syntactic complexity of sentence structure." Mathematical Modelling in Linguistics and Text Analysis. 104.

  • Yan, Jianwei; Li, Qidi & Liu, Haitao. (2025). "Defining digital humanities and examining its relationship with linguistics." Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 40(1), 354-380.

2024

  • Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Haitao. (2024). "Basic word order typology revisited: a crosslinguistic quantitative study based on UD and WALS." Linguistics Vanguard. 9(1), 73-85.

  • Dai, Zheyuan; Liu, Haitao & Yan, Jianwei. (2024). "Revisiting English written VP-ellipsis and VP-substitution: A dependency-based analysis." Linguistics Vanguard. 9(1), 13-23.

  • Yan, Jianwei. (2024). "The current state and prominent features of quantitative linguistics through the lens of QUALICO 2023." Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. 31(1), 54-67.

  • Yan, Jianwei; Li, Qidi & Jiang, Jingyang. (2024). "The development of phrase-frames in EFL learners' essays." International Journal of Applied Linguistics. 34(4), 1689-1708.

  • Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Haitao. (2024). "Investigating the Hierarchical Order of Function Words in SUD and UD Treebanks." The Status of Function Words in Dependency Grammar. 43, 629-666.

  • Chen, Yixi & Yan, Jianwei. (2024). "Exploring the Role of Sentence-Final Particles in Spoken Cantonese." Glottometrics. 57, 21-39.

2023

  • 阎建玮; 刘海涛. (2023). "基于高频句法关系依存方向的语序类型计量研究." 语言文字应用. (2), 79-90.

  • 邵斌; 阎建玮; 郑憬. (2023). "词类转化与语言形态类型关系的定量研究." 外语教学与研究. 55(4), 497-508.

  • Yan, Jianwei & Yih, Tsy. (2023). "Igor Mel'čuk. 2021. Ten studies in Dependency Syntax (Review)." Canadian Journal of Linguistics. 68(4), 622-627.

  • Li, Qidi & Yan, Jianwei. (2023). "Corpus linguistics for writing development: A guide for research (Review)." System.

2022

  • Yan, Jianwei. (2022). "Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach, by Julia Silge and David Robinson." Natural Language Engineering. 28(1), 137-139.

  • Yih, Tsy; Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Haitao. (2022). "How syntactic analysis influences the calculation of mean dependency distance." Proceedings of PACLIC 36. 83-92.

  • Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Haitao. (2022). "Semantic roles or syntactic functions: The effects of annotation scheme on the results of dependency measures." Studia Linguistica. 76(2), 406-428.

  • Zhou, Xianwu & Yan, Jianwei. (2022). "Assessing the AWE-Based Teacher-Assisted Feedback Model for College English Writing Teaching." International Conference on Computer Science and Education. 421-429. Springer.

2021

  • Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Haitao. (2021). "Quantitative analysis of Chinese and English verb valencies based on probabilistic valency pattern theory." Workshop on Chinese Lexical Semantics. 152-162. Springer.

  • Li, Wenping & Yan, Jianwei. (2021). "Probability distribution of dependency distance based on a treebank of Japanese EFL learners' interlanguage." Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. 28(2), 172-186.

  • Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Haitao. (2021). "Morphology and word order in Slavic languages: Insights from annotated corpora." Вопросы языкознания. (4), 131-159.

2019

  • Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Haitao. (2019). "Which annotation scheme is more expedient to measure syntactic difficulty and cognitive demand?" Proceedings of the first workshop on quantitative syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2019). 16-24.

2018

  • Wang, Yaqin & Yan, Jianwei. (2018). "A quantitative analysis on a literary genre essay's syntactic features." Quantitative analysis of dependency structures. 295-314. De Gruyter Mouton.

2017

  • Yan, Jianwei & Liu, Siqi. (2017). "The distribution of dependency relations in Great Expectations and Jane Eyre." Glottometrics. 37, 13-33.

Academic Network

Haitao Liu 刘海涛  |  Yaqin Wang 王雅琴  |  Xinying Chen 陈芯莹  |  Miroslav Kubát