Hilary M. Chappell holds the Chair in Linguistic Typology of East Asia at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her main research is on the typology of Sinitic languages (or Chinese dialects) with the goal of investigating the extent of their linguistic diversity. To this end, she has been carrying out fieldwork over the past seven years in Hunan province, China, on the Xianghua language. A second, related research area pertains to the diachronic syntax of Southern Min (Hokkien), making use of a corpus of late 16th and early 17th century materials. Her publications include Sinitic Grammar: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives (OUP, 2001), Chinese Grammar: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives (OUP, 2004), and, with Christine Lamarre, A Grammar and Lexicon of Hakka (EHESS, 2005).