I am a sixth year PhD candidate (a member of synners & semmers) in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin, mainly advised by Dr. John Beavers (I am also working with Dr. David Beaver and Dr. Ashwini Deo).

My dissertation explores the semantics and pragmatics of the use of so-called topic marker -(n)un in spoken Korean. Specifically, I am interested in its interaction with other well-studied semantic phenomena, namely genericity and contrastiveness. My other projects include a lexical semantic study on causative constructions in Korean, which further addresses the issues on the typology of causativization, and a pragmatic study on the impolite use of honorifics in Korean.

I have two joint projects on discourse markers in Korean: (i) iteratives (will be presenting at LSA 2026), with Seungho Nam (Uconn) and Seoyeong Lee (Stanford), and (ii) seolma (in progress), with Asher Zheng (UT Austin) and Sampada Despande (UT Austin). On iteratives, we explore three iteratives (tasi, tto, -to) that function as a presupposition trigger and how they show different levels of QUD sensitivity. On seolma, we explore how it gives rise to an expectation bias which differs from an epistemic bias, and explain this via Expectation Revision Potential.

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Recent/upcoming events

November 2025. Mini talk (informal) at UCL, London

December 2025. Oasis 5 in Edinburgh

January 2026. LSA 2026 in New Orleans