Research

Research Interests

• (Non-canonical) Questions
• Scope Interaction
• Argument structure
• Ellipsis

Projects

Encoding speaker’s negative bias:The semantics and pragmatics of wh-polar questions

• investigates how and where the negative speaker attitude found in wh-polar questions is encoded in grammar, as exemplified by constructions like Where is he a vegetarian?! in Korean and Cantonese, which corresponds to Since when is he a vegetarian?! in English.
• examines the contextual conditions under which wh-polar questions receive a rhetorical interpretation.
• explores the relation between prosody and the degree of speaker bias.
  
  

The syntax of existential locatives and possessives in Korean and Japanese

• examines the argument structure of locative and possessive constructions that use an existential predicate: iss- in Korean and aru/iru in Japanese.
• shows that distinct analyses provide more systematic and unified accounts than previous uniform analyses.
  
  

The scope (un-)ambiguity in Korean: evidence from doubly quantified sentences

• examines the recent claim that Korean is not scopally rigid, contrary to traditional arguments in theoretical literature.
• conducts experiments addressing scope ambiguity in Korean, using sentences that include two quantified expressions, (e.g., Every student met some teacher).