Moira Yip

Moira Yip is a British linguist. She earned her PhD in Linguistics in 1980 from MIT. She retired in 2009 from University College London (UCL). She had been Professor of Linguistics there. At UCL she also was co-director of the Centre for Human Communication. She was also Pro-Provost for China. Before joining UCL, she was Professor of Linguistics and Acting Dean at the University of California-Irvine (1992-1999) and Associate Professor at Brandeis University (1982-1992).

Moira Yip worked on theory of phonology (ideas about how sound is important in language). She was especially interested in phonology of Chinese. Her dissertation on the Tonal phonology of Chinese was published in the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series (Routledge). In 2002 she published the first modern textbook on tone in the Cambridge University Press linguistics textbook series.

She is married to business academic, George Yip.

Important publications

• Yip, Moira J. 1980. The tonal phonology of Chinese. PhD dissertation, MIT.
• Yip, Moira. 1988. The Obligatory Contour Principle and Phonological Rules: a Loss of Identity. Linguistic Inquiry, 19 (1), 65-100.
• Yip, Moira. 1989. Contour tones. Phonology, 6(1), 149-174.
• Yip, Moira. 2002. Tone. Cambridge University Press.