Lingüística y Ciencia Cognitiva (LyCC)

 

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.