Soo-Hwan Lee

Theoretical

Dissertation

2024 | Introducing Arguments and Case. Doctoral dissertation. NYU. [dissertation] [preprint]

Papers

Submitted | A composite probe analysis of extraction across weak wh-islands in English control constructions. (with Michael Barrie)
Revised & resubmitted | Is it syntax or syncretism? Phases and honorific case markers.
2026 | No escape from syntax: Gĩkũyũ nominalizations and the Complex Head analysis. Journal of Linguistics. [paper]
2025 | TP in Oshiwambo subject nominalizations. Glossa. (with Olivia Ndapo) [paper]
2024 | Syntactic negation in Ewe (Tongugbe) agent nominalizations. Syntax. (with Selikem Gotah) [paper] [preprint] (And yes, this predates the launch of Syntactic Theory and Research (STAR)!)

Conference presentations

Upcoming | Syntax versus syncretism: Phases and the intervention effect of honorific case markers. WAFL 19.
2026 | Korean nominal stacking and the argument/oblique alternation. AAAL Workshop 2. (joint work with and presented by Yining Nie)
2025 | Wh-extraction across wh-islands in English control constructions. LSK 2025. (with Michael Barrie)
2025 | Two types of subject nominalizations in Gĩkũyũ. LSA 2025.
2024 | Tense-associated nominalization in Oshiwambo. ACAL 55. (with Olivia Ndapo)
2024 | The PCC and honorification. CLS 60. (a revised version of this work is available [here])
2024 | Agent nominalization without of-insertion in Setswana. LSA 2024. [proceedings paper]
2023 | Negation in Ewe (Tongugbe) agent nominalization. NELS 53. (with Selikem Gotah)
2023 | Introducing arguments in and out of the thematic domain. JK 30.
2022 | Linearly adjacent allomorphs and syntactic copies. CLS 58. [proceedings paper]
2021 | Korean case stacking and the nominal template. PLC 45. (with Yining Nie) [proceedings paper]
2020 | Swahili locatives and underspecification in PF. LSA 2020. (with Inkie Chung)
2019 | Speech act phrases in Korean nominal structures. JK 27. [proceedings paper]
2019 | Prosodic boundaries and EPP in Swahili. AMP 2019. [proceedings paper]
2019 | Nominal mismatches in Swahili locatives. LSA 2019. (with Doo-Won Lee) [proceedings paper]
2018 | Suppletive allomorphy of pronouns conditioned by humbleness in Korean. BLS 44. (with Minjung Kim) [proceedings paper]

Book chapter

2023 | Formality weakening and the underspecified expressive yo in Korean. In Elin McCready and Hiroki Nomoto, editors. Discourse Particles in Asian Languages. Routledge. [book chapter] [preprint]

Computational & experimental

Papers

To appear | Beyond linearity and beyond English: Language model performance on Korean NPI licensing. Proceedings of SCiL 2026. (with C. Lee and G-H. Shin)
2026 | Open-access Dataset on Acceptability Ratings of Korean Clausal Constructions by Humans and GPT Models. Proceedings of LREC 2026. (with G-H. Shin and C. Lee) [link]
2023 | Do language models know how to be polite?. Proceedings of SCiL 2023. (with S. Wang) [link]
2023 | Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). (with various authors) [link]
2022 | Can language models capture syntactic associations without surface cues? A case study of reflexive anaphor licensing in English control constructions. Proceedings of SCiL 2022. (with S. Schuster) [link]
2021 | NOPE: A Corpus of Naturally-Occurring Presuppositions in English. Proceedings of CoNLL 2021. (with +A. Parrish, +S. Schuster, +A. Warstadt, O. Agha, Z. Zhao, S. R. Bowman, and T. Linzen) [+ = equal contribution] [link]
2021 | Does Putting a Linguist in the Loop Improve NLU Data Collection? Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2021. (with A. Parrish, W. Huang, O. Agha, N. Nangia, A. Warstadt, K. Aggarwal, E. Allaway, T. Linzen, and S. R. Bowman) [link]

Invited talks

Upcoming | Argument structure inside Bantu nominalizations. Invited talk at Chosun University.
2025 | What Bantu languages tell us about nominalizations. Plenary talk at the 10th Asian Junior Linguists (AJL 10) Conference at International Christian University (ICU).
2025 | Don’t sweep everything under the Lexicon! Invited talk at Sogang University.
2025 | The Person Case Constraint (PCC) and the constraints on honorific markers. Syntax/semantics reading group at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
2024 | Do language models (LMs) know how to be polite? LM performance on linguistic dependencies sensitive to politeness. Seminar talk in the Integrated Language Science and Technology (ILST) at the University of Pennsylvania.
2024 | The syntax of subject nominalizations in Gĩkũyũ. Colloquium in the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, NYU Syntax Brown Bag.
2024 | Are you a subject, an object, or something else? Case markers and argument structure. Invited talk in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Florida, Invited talk in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky.
2024 | Subject nominalizations in Ewe and Oshiwambo (joint work with Selikem Gotah and Olivia Ndapo). Penn Syntax Lab, Yale Syntax Reading Group.
2023 | A in A’-domain. Implicational Hierarchies in Clausal Complementation Workshop.
2023 | Addressees as applied arguments. S-Lab at the University of Maryland, The Korean Generative Grammar Circle & Hansung University Workshop.
2022 | Introducing arguments in and out of the thematic domain: Evidence from Korean case markers. Penn Syntax Lab, MIT Syntax Square, Yale Syntax Reading Group.