About me
Welcome! I am a linguist specializing in syntax and morphology. I am currently a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Gyeongsang National University (GNU) in Korea. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania where I worked with Marlyse Baptista. I received my PhD from New York University (NYU) where I worked with Alec Marantz. You can find my CV here.
My projects focus on how nominal arguments are represented and licensed in syntax. In my dissertation, I investigate how case markers interact with honorific features in syntactically meaningful ways. Here, I pursue the idea that first Merge (complement-head relation) is unique and different from non-first Merge (specifier-head relation). In my other projects, I examine the syntactic size of entity nominalizations (e.g., a singer) by drawing evidence from understudied and underrepresented languages. My findings so far suggest that entity nominalizations come in various verbal sizes and they can be as big as TPs/NegPs and as small as a verbal complex head.
My research also focuses on evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) on tasks related to linguistic dependencies, including, but not limited to, agreement, binding, control, negation, and politeness. I am also interested in how LMs handle low-resource and typologically diverse languages.
Research interests
- Nominal structure & nominalizations
- Argument structure
- Case & discourse markers
- (L)LM performance