Research

Research Interests

  • (Non-canonical) questions: biased polar questions, conjectural questions, inter alia;
  • How evidentiality can affect other implicatures (evidential bias, conjecturality);
  • Intonational meaning of nuclear contours in speech acts (mostly in pitch accent languages);
  • Speech act distinctions via sentence-final particles in East Asian languages
  • Formal pragmatics; basically, how all of the above purport to norms of discourse

Side Interests

  • wh-indefinites in Korean and Japanese (interacting with different sentence types)
  • Social perception of Spanish by Asian Latinos
  • Social meaning implications of Korean honorifics (interacting with speech acts)

Projects

Ambiguity of Korean long-form negation polar questions and disambiguation by contextual evidence
  • Negative polar questions (NPQs) are widely known for encoding speaker's positive epistemic bias. A less well-known but still well-established fact about Korean long-form NPQs (LN-PQs) is that the bias reading is polarity-ambiguous (both 'yes, p / no, ¬p' and 'yes, ¬p / no, p' are possible continuations of discourse). I show the bias disambiguation by situating this construction in context, especially subjecting it to negative contextual evidence. I also employ evidentiality (grammatical encoding of the source of information) in Korean to highlight the negative bias reading in Korean LN-PQs.
  • I use Gunlogson's (2008) commitment-based model to capture the two bias readings in Korean LN-PQs. Some typological considerations on Interrogative Flip (the flipping of evidential source in inquisitive speech acts) are also discussed.
  • Paper: Proceedings of CLS 62 (forthcoming).
  • Poster: Interrogative Flip revisited: adding evidentiality to biased polar questions. The West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 44 (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; May 6–8, 2026).
  • Talk: A question of negatively biased commitment: evidence from Korean evidential Long Negation Polar Questions. Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS) 62 (April 17–19, 2026).
  • Talk: Speaker bias in commitment terms. Theoretical Linguistics at Keio (TaLK) Semantics Conference (March 14–16, 2026).
  • Poster: Commitment and Bias in Korean Long Negation Polar Questions (LN-PQs). Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting 2026 (New Orleans, LA; January 8–11, 2026).
Form-based account of conjectural questions
  • A recent project that took off as a puzzle found in the interaction of sentence type and evidentiality in Korean LN-PQs, some sentential force and an utterance-final (rising) contour come to the foci of discussion. I aim to show that conjectural meaning in conjectural questions across languages (notably, German verb-final wohl questions in Eckardt, 2020) can be reduced to the interaction between declarative force, prosody AND evidential dimensions.
Context and inquisitivity in Puerto Rican Spanish
  • I review the role of prosody in biased polar questions, introduced as Ladd's (1981) Outer vs. Inner negation questions in Armstrong 2017. Following up on Armstrong's DCT-style production study, I conducted a perception study on assertion contours of Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS), specifically under what contextual conditions can these contours be construed as purely speaker-biased.
  • Talk: Bias Without Negation: The Role of Prosody in Puerto Rican Spanish Polar Questions. Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS) 2025 at University of Arizona (November 13–15, 2025).
  • Talk: An experimental Study on Speaker bias in Puerto Rican Spanish Polar Questions. 55th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) 55 (September 10-12, 2025).
  • Talk: Contextual Effect on Speaker Bias Polar Questions in Puerto Rican Spanish. 2nd meeting of Polar Questions Forms[s] Across Languages (POQAL-2) at the University of Amsterdam (April 24-25, 2025).