Dongsik Lim, PhD

Presentation

Dongsik Lim, PhD
Postdoctoral researcher "Juan de la Cierva"
e-mail: lim.dongsik@cchs.csic.es
Office: 1D21
Phone number: + 34 916022828
Web page


Short Bio:


Educational History

Aug. 2005 - Dec. 2010:     Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Southern California, LA, USA

Jun. 2004:                      3rd North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, UCLA (Student)

Mar. 2000 - Feb. 2002:     MA in Linguistics, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

Aug. 2001:                     13th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, University of Helsinki (Student)

Mar. 1996 - Feb. 2000:     BA in Linguistics, Seoul National University (with summa cum laude), Seoul, South Korea


Fellowships, Honors, and Awards

Jun. 2010:                       Summer Dissertation Research & Writing Award, University of Southern California

Aug. 2008 - May 2009:      Louis D. Beaumont Fellowship, University of Southern California

Aug. 2008:                      Travel Grant, For The Second European Conference on Korean Linguistics, SOAS

Aug. 2005 - May 2010:      College Merit Award Fellowship, University of Southern California

Feb. 2000:                       Summa Cum Laude, Seoul National University

May. 1998 - Feb. 2000:      Scholarship, The Korea Scholarship Foundation for the Future Leaders (http://www.kosffl.or.kr)

Aug. 1996 - Feb. 1998:      Scholarship, College of Humanities, Seoul National University


Teaching

University of Southern California
 * Ling 275lg: 'Language and Mind'
    - Teaching Assistant: Grading & Leading discussion sections 
    - Fall 2009 (with Prof. Toben Mintz and Prof. Sandra Disner): 3 sections, about 60 students
    - Spring 2008 (with Prof. Barry Schein and Prof. Toben Mintz): 3 sections, about 50 students
    - Spring 2007 (with Prof. Elaine Andersen and Prof. Rachel Walker): 2 sections, about 40 students

Army Community Service in Camp Stanley, Uijeongbu, South Korea
 * Korean Language Program for U.S. Soldiers and Families 
    - Volunteer Instructor
    - Apr. 2003 - Dec. 2003: 6 students in average for each quarter (total three quarters)
 

 

Research Interests

My research focuses on theoretical and empirical issues in the area of formal semantics, formal pragmatics, and their interaction with syntax. Three main empirical domains in these areas define my recent and current research agenda: evidentials and modals, focus particles, and lexicon-syntax interface issues relative to gradable and directed motion predicates.
 
My dissertation focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality and epistemic modality in Korean, and their semantic effects in interrogative sentences. Specifically, I investigate the semantic nature of Korean evidentiality, its relation to epistemic modality, and to the semantics of indexicality. The thesis identifies various evidential markers in Korean, discusses their similarities to and differences from epistemic modals, and provides an account for an interesting difference that indexicals and Korean evidentials display when occurring in interrogative sentences: whereas evidentials undergo the well-known phenomenon of origo-shift (a shift of perspective from speaker’s evidentiality to addressee’s evidentiality), other indexicals do not. In the core part of the dissertation, I show that this difference follows straightforwardly from the standard semantics of interrogatives and my view that evidentials denote functions from propositions to Kaplanian characters, where the evidential implications are encoded in terms of an expressive presupposition. This analysis provides new theoretical insight on the semantics and pragmatics of evidentials across language, and on related phenomena in English. Furthermore, it carries very interesting implications relative to the predictions of the standard view of the semantics of interrogatives.
 
In addition to evidentiality, my previous research investigated questions regarding the semantics and pragmatics of scalar focus particles in Korean with particular emphasis on -lato and -to, seemingly corresponding to the English discourse particle even, but exhibiting peculiar distributional properties which distinguish them from English even. In this study I proposed that this difference follows from the specific lexical contribution of -to and -lato. This study, together with my research with Prof. Elena Guerzoni on concessive conditionals, which in Korean involve those particles, leads me to the investigation of the quantificational force of these focus sensitive operators and other focus particles across East-Asian languages, and to focus on issues regarding the interaction of scalar focus particles with indefinites and negative polarity items across languages.
 
Finally, I am currently working on a research project on the interface between lexicon and syntax in the empirical domain of directed motion and aspectual predicates in Korean. Whereas in a previous paper (with Prof. Maria-Luisa Zubizarreta) I discussed the event structure and the syntax of aspectual predicates and directed motion constructions in Korean, currently I am investigating the correlation between these predicates and gradable predicates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Publications

 

Peer-Reviewed Proceedings
 
Lim, Dongsik. In press. When Declaratives Become Evidentials: the Korean Non-final -ta- as an Indirect Evidential, in Proceedings of the 18th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, Stanford: CSLI Publications
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Become with comparatives: a case study from Korean deadjectival inchoatives. in Duk-Ho An and Soo-Yeon Kim. (eds.)(2010), Proceedings of 12th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar. Seoul: Hankwukmwunhwasa.
 
Lim, Dongsik and Maria-Luisa Zubizarreta. 2010. The Syntax of Inchoatives: -eci, event structure, and scalarity, in Yeon, Jaehoon and Kiaer, Jieun (eds.)(2010), Selected Papers from the 2nd European Conference on Korean Linguistics, München: Lincom Europa.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Decompositional Analysis of Korean Focus Particle -lato, in Iwasaki, Shoichi, Hoji, Hajime, Clancy, Patricia M., and Sohn, Sung-Ock (eds.)(2010), Proceedings of the 17th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, 247-261, Stanford: CSLI Publications.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2009. Korean Non-Final -ta- as an Indirect Evidential Marker, in Grosvald, Michael and Soares, Dionne (eds.)(2009), Proceedings of the 38th Western Conference on Linguistics, 175-186, Department of Linguistics, UC Davis.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2009. Korean Focus Particle -lato and Weak Additivity, in Proceedings of 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18), Linguistic Society of Korea.
 
Guerzoni, Elena, and Dongsik Lim. 2007. Even if, Factivity and Focus, in Puig-Waldmüller, E.(ed.)(2007), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 11, Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, pp. 276-290.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2004. Failure of Contraposition and the Problem of Presupposition in Counterfactual Conditionals, in Proceedings of 2004 International Conference of the Linguistic Society of Korea, Yonsei University, South Korea, pp. 160-169.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2004. The Concessive Meaning and the Scalar Implicature in Counterfactual Conditionals, in Proceedings of 2004 Summer Conference of Korean Society for Language and Information, pp. 1-16. (Written in Korean)
 
 
Other Publications
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2004. Event Semantics and the Problem of Individuation in Medieval Philosophy, Studies in Linguistics 25, Seoul Linguistics Club, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University, pp. 59-69. (Written in Korean)
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2001. Event Structure and Meaning Interpretation of Korean Middle Construction, CLI Working Papers in Language and Information 1, Center for Language and Information, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University, pp. 89-100. (Written in Korean)
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2001. Post-structuralism and Event Semantics, Studies in Linguistics 21, Seoul Linguistics Club, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University, pp. 43-50. (Written in Korean)
 
 
In Preparation
 
Lim, Dongsik. In preparation. Questions, Contexts, and Evidentiality.

Lim, Dongsik, and Maria-Luisa Zubizarreta. In preparation. Roots as directional paths in inchoative constructions: a view from Korean and Spanish.

Lim, Dongsik. In preparation. On the distribution and the semantics of the Korean focus particle -lato, To appear in Chungmin Lee, Ferenc Kiefer, and Manfred Krifka (eds.), Selected papers from the workshop on Contrastiveness in Information Structure and/or Scalar Implicatures in the 18th International Congress of Linguists. (proposed by editors to be published in Springer)

Conferences

 Presentations in peer-reviewed conferences

 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Perspective Shift of Evidentials in Interrogatives: A Case Study of Korean Evidential Markers, the 41st North East Linguistics Society, October 22-24, 2010, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Evidentials, questions, and characters: A case study from Korean, the 20th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, October 1-3, 2010, University of Oxford, UK.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Evidentials in Interrogatives: a case study from Korean, the 15th Sinn und Bedeutung, September 9-11, 2010, University of Saarland, Germany.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Become with comparatives: a case study of Korean deadjectival inchoatives, the 12th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG 12), August 17-20, 2010, Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Measure phrases and semantics of deadjectival inchoative verbs in Korean, the 84th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 7-10, 2010, Baltimore.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2008. When declaratives become evidentials: the Korean non-final -ta- as an indirect evidential, the 38th Western Conference on Linguistics, November 21-23, 2008, University of California Davis.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2008. When declaratives become evidentials: the Korean non-final -ta- as an indirect evidential, the 18th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, November 13-15, 2008, Graduate Center, City University in New York.
 
Lim, Dongsik, and Maria-Luisa Zubizarreta. 2008. The Syntax of Inchoatives: -eci, event structure, and scalarity, The 2nd European Conference on Korean Linguistics (ECKL 2), School of Oriental and Asian Studies, London, UK.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2008. Korean Focus Particle -lato and Weak Additivity, the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18), July 21-26, 2008, Korea University, South Korea.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2007. Decompositional Analysis of Korean Focus Particle -lato, the 17th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, November 9-11, 2007, UCLA.
 
Guerzoni, Elena, and Dongsik Lim. 2006. Even If, Factivity, and Focus, Sinn und Bedeutung 11, September 21-23, 2006, Barcelona, Spain.
 
Guerzoni, Elena, and Dongsik Lim. 2006. Even If, Factivity, and Focus, The 2006 Milan Meeting, June 15-17, 2006, Gargnano, Italy.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2004. Failure of Contraposition and the Problem of Presupposition in Counterfactual Conditionals, 2004 International Conference of the Linguistic Society of Korea, July 28-31, 2004, Yonsei University, South Korea.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2004. Failure of Contraposition and the Problem of Presupposition in Counterfactual Conditionals, Student Session in Third North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI), June 21-25, 2004, UCLA.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2004. The Concessive Meaning and the Scalar Implicature in Counterfactual Conditionals, 2004 Summer Conference of Korean Society for Language and Information, June 18, 2004, Sungshin Women University, South Korea.
 
 
Presentations in non-peer-reviewed conferences and meetings
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2009. Question as a set of characters: a case of Korean evidential, the 2nd California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics, November 21, 2009, UCSC.
 
 
Poster presentations in peer-reviewed conferences
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2008. Inchoatives as a Directed Motion along Degrees: the Case of Korean, Poster presented at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 8- 11, 2009, San Francisco.
 
 
Alternates at peer-reviewed conferences
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2009. Evidential Perspective Shift in Korean Questions, 6th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, September 4-6, 2009, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan.
 
 
Invited talks
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Inchoatives, anticausatives, and directed motion constructions in Korean: focusing on -eci, Guest lecturer, Graduate class 'Advanced Semantics', October 7, 2010, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Question, character, and evidentiality: a case study from Korean, Korean Society of Language and Information, September 18, 2010.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2010. Question, character, and evidentiality: a case study from Korean, Linguistics Colloquium, September 14, 2010, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University. 
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2009. Evidentiality and the problem of perspectives, Syntax-Semantics Club, July 7, 2009, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University.
 
Lim, Dongsik. 2009. The Syntax of Inchoatives: -eci, Event Structure, and Scalarity, Syntax-Semantics Club, June 23, 2009, Department of Linguistics, Seoul National University.