Death of Zhitang Yang-Drocourt, Chinese language professor (1988-2017) at Inalco

Zhitang Yang-Drocourt was born in Beijing on October 3, 1951. There, she had studied French language and literature at Peking University (Beida), studies she continued in France as part of a master's degree prepared at EHESS under the supervision of Gérard Genette, before turning to Chinese linguistics: DEA on Les constructions comparatives en chinois vernaculaire du XIVe siècle (EHESS, 1986), then doctorat nouveau régime on Évolution syntaxique du classificateur en chinois, du XIVe siècle av.C. au XVIIe siècle (EHESS, 1993). Her HDR dissertation, defended in 2008 at ENS Lyon, was entitled Syntagme, mot, morphème et caractère, questions de langue et de linguistique chinoises.

Representative, then language teacher at Inalco between 1988 and 1994, she then became lecturer, then, in 2013, university professor. She has been Professor Emeritus since 2017. For more than thirty years, Ms. Drocourt served the school with loyalty, enthusiasm and dedication.

Passionate about teaching the Chinese language and driven by a sense of community, Zhitang Drocourt devoted a significant part of her time to her teaching duties. She was fully involved in the development of the Asiathèque's Methode de chinois, conceived at Inalco: after helping to write the first volume, she was one of the main architects of the "second level" method, which benefited, among other things, from her remarkable skills in lexicology. She knew how to describe the mechanisms of the Chinese language in a precise, clear and elegant style. For many years, she coordinated language teaching in the Department of Chinese Studies. Close to her students and colleagues, she was also concerned with the training of new recruits, assisting them in their discovery of the profession.

Zhitang was also an active member of the CRLAO (Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale). A specialist in contemporary uses of Chinese script and Mandarin grammar, she supervised doctoral students and pursued her own research within the "Formal syntax and semantics of contemporary East Asian languages: Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese" team, and more specifically the "Analysis of Chinese" axis. We owe her some twenty articles on quantitative expressions, Chinese writing, reduplication in contemporary Chinese and, above all, Chinese lexicology, a field of linguistics in which she was, according to the testimony of her colleagues at CRLAO, the most competent researcher.

She had published at the Asiathèque a Parlons chinois which, far from being a simple practical manual for teaching the language, constituted a sum on the history and characteristics of the Chinese language. During her emeritus years, interrupted all too soon, she had the satisfaction of completing another work on a subject close to her heart: L'écriture chinoise. Au-delà du mythe idéographique (Armand Colin, 2022). On the other hand, she will not have had the time to complete the grammar of modern standard Chinese that she had planned.

The Chinese Studies Department and the whole of Inalco share in the grief of her family and friends, and salute with emotion the memory of a woman who was, for many years, one of the pillars of Chinese language teaching at our institution.

Inalco is deeply saddened by her death.