Zhiguo Xie, assistant professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, received the prestigious Young Scholar Award (YSA) for Best Paper in Chinese Linguistics from the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) at its 21st annual conference in Taipei, Taiwan. This award recognizes Xie's theoretical research on the interaction of possessive verbs and degree constructions. He is the first and only recipient of this award since 2010; he was shortlisted for the same award in 2009, when he was still a PhD candidate at Cornell.

The YSA award was created in 1994 to “promote, recognize, and encourage scholarship” by researchers of Chinese linguistics under 35 years of age and below the rank of associate professor.

Xie's research centers on exploring what natural language utterances mean and how their meanings are derived from the structural representations. Within this broad research program, he is particularly interested in the questions of where and how human languages differ from each other. The data he uses to tackle these questions primarily come from Mandarin Chinese and English. He is also interested in bilingualism and sociolinguistics.

Xie teaches courses in Chinese linguistics and culture.