Lawrence Cheung

At CASBS, Lawrence Cheung will work on two studies. The first is an ongoing interdisciplinary project that uses AI to analyze speech and discover fine-grained cognitive-linguistic markers indicative of very early-stage dementia across languages. The goal is to facilitate low-cost, simple, and non-invasive screening and prognosis of dementia at scale.

Another project examines how languages grammatically encode the speech acts of warning and threatening. Searle’s theory of speech acts has played a key role in linguistics and philosophy. Despite their importance in communication, the speech acts of warning and threatening have received relatively little attention, compared with questions, commands, exclamations, etc. The project compares cross-linguistic strategies for grammaticalizing the speech acts of warning and threatening (e.g. sentence-final particles in Cantonese) and analyzes their pragmatic meanings.

Cheung is an associate professor of linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and director of its master’s programs in Linguistics. He has published in the Journal of East Asian Linguistics, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, and other journals. He is a member of the interdisciplinary team that received two Healthy Longevity Catalyst Awards, which were jointly organized by the US National Academy of Medicine and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong in 2023 and 2024. Cheung is the CUHK-Stanford University CASBS Fellow for 2026–27.