Yanyu Guo

Dr. Yanyu Guo is a tenured Lecturer in Chinese Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland, and serves as Director of the MA Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (MA-TCSOL) program. She is a board member of the Committee on Linguistics Theories and Language Education Research under the International Society for Chinese Language Teaching. Previously, she held positions at Tsinghua University (2011-2013) and the University of Cambridge (2013-2020), where she conducted AHRC-funded postdoctoral research on multilingualism and bilingualism.

Her research focuses on bilingualism and multilingualism across the lifespan, formal linguistics (syntax-semantics interface), Chinese linguistics, language processing, and the application of generative artificial intelligence in Chinese language instruction. She leads two trilingualism projects (English-Irish-Chinese and English-Korean-Chinese) funded by Enterprise Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy, and collaborates internationally with institutions in Spain, China, and the UK.

Dr. Guo’s peer-reviewed publications span 15 years, covering L2/L3 acquisition of Chinese aspect markers, sentence-final particles, yes-no questions, and syntactic transfer. Her work integrates generative linguistics with pedagogical applications, emphasizing the role of linguistic distance, typological differences, and prior language experience in shaping multilingual grammars.

Scientific Awards and Grants:

• Trinity College External Studentship (Cambridge PhD funding)
• AHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship (MEITS project)
• Enterprise Ireland Grant for 'Diversity and Unity among Multilinguals' (2023-2024)
• Royal Irish Academy Grant for 'Linguistic Distance and Second Language Proficiency' (2025-2026)

She has supervised two completed PhD projects and is currently advising five PhD candidates at UCC, with a focus on generative approaches to multilingual acquisition and Chinese linguistics. Her research groups include the Cambridge-Chinese University of Hong Kong Joint Laboratory for Bilingualism and collaborations with the International Association of Chinese Linguistics.