Taehoon Hendrik Kim (김태훈)'s Homepage

About Me

I am a recent PhD recipient from the UCLA Department of Linguistics. The title of my dissertation is The syntax of negation in Korean given an antisymmetric and cartographic framework. My advisor was Hilda Koopman. From 2019 to 2022, I was a lecturer of English at Korea Military Academy.

Broadly speaking, my research interests are in syntax and its interface with semantics and phonology. My specific interests lie in negation, negative indefinites, negative polarity items, and intervention effects. Although I primarily consider myself as a theoretical linguist, I am keen on using quantitative methods to evaluate different linguistic theories. I am also highly interested in co-speech gestures and exploring ways to formalize and incorporate them into linguistic theory.

News

[March 2024] I will be presenting part of my dissertation work at CLS 60 in Chicago, IL, April 26–28, 2024.
[February 2024] I defended my dissertation!
[December 2023] I earned my PhD and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area!
[November 2023] I will be presenting part of my dissertation work at GLOW in Asia XIV in Hong Kong, March 6–8, 2024.
[September 2022] I am back in Los Angeles!

Publications [Google Scholar]

Kim, Taehoon Hendrik. 2023. The syntax of negation in Korean given an antisymmetric and cartographic framework. UCLA dissertation. [Abstract]

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a unified analysis of negation in Korean, and the claim to be defended is that it is possible to do so when we rethink the syntax of Korean. This dissertation reassesses the syntax of preverbal and postverbal negation by taking into consideration a framework which is based on the antisymmetry theory (Kayne 1994) in conjunction with the cartographic program (Cinque 1999), building on the works by Koopman & Szabolcsi (2000), Cinque (2005), and Koopman (2005). The proposed framework assumes a theory of syntax in which the linear order of elements reflects their hierarchical order, with the only possible hierarchical order being Spec-Head-Complement order. It bans post-syntactic operations, covert movement, and head movement. The main idea is that the proposed framework will choose the analysis for preverbal negation, postverbal negation, and negative indefinites and intervention effects.

PDF

Kim, Taehoon Hendrik. 2017. An Experimental Study of Phonological Variation and Variation in Scope Judgments in Korean. UCLA MA thesis. [Abstract]

Korean speakers split into two groups regarding how they interpret a negative sentence with a quantified object, such as "The boy didn't eat every cookie" (Han et al. 2007). For a scenario in which a boy eats some but not all cookies, some speakers regard the sentence as a truthful description of the scenario, while other speakers do not. In other words, only the former accepts the wide scope reading of negation (the not>every reading). One hypothesis of this fact is that each group of speakers has a different grammar, where the distinction rests on whether the verb moves to T or not; this is Han et al.'s two-grammar hypothesis. Certain theories of the syntax-phonology interface (e.g. Samuels 2011) predict that the grammatical split should be accompanied by a phonological split. Specifically, the prediction is that the Post-Obstruent Tensing process in Korean for speakers who reject the not>every reading should be blocked from applying between the transitive verb and the object of a simple declarative sentence. A two-part experiment composed of a truth-value judgment task and a production task was conducted to test the prediction. The result reproduced the findings of Han et al. and showed that speakers' scope judgments have no notable correlation with the occurrence of Post-Obstruent Tensing. In the discussion, alternative theories of the syntax-phonology interface and problematic aspects of the two-grammar hypothesis are considered.

PDF

Kim, Taehoon Hendrik. 2015. On the Nature of Concessivity in Predicate Focus: A Study of Sigma in Korean Verb Doubling and English Verb Phrase. Michigan State University MA thesis.

Kim, Taehoon. 2014. Degree Comparisons across Possible Worlds: Measure Phrase Modification with '-(i)na'. In Susumu Kuno, Ik-Hwan Lee, John Whitman, Joan Maling, Young-Se Kang, Peter Sells, James Hye-Suk Yoon, Youngjun Jang, and Young-mee Yu Cho (eds.), Harvard Studies in Korean Linguistics XV, 57-73. Seoul, South Korea: Hankook Munhwasa.
PDF

Kim, Taehoon. 2012. Semantics of Korean Multiple Nominative Constructions. In Bum-Sik Park (ed.), Proceedings of the 14th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar: Three Factors and Syntactic Theory, 231-246. Seoul, South Korea: Hankook Munhwasa.

Presentations

Antisymmetry and cartography

Kim, Taehoon Hendrik. Against the post-syntactic node-sprouting for the Korean honorific morpheme. Poster to be presented at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS 60), Chicago, IL, April 26–28, 2024.
Kim, Taehoon Hendrik. Against the post-syntactic node-sprouting for the Korean honorific morpheme. Poster presented at the 14th Generative Linguistics in the Old World in Asia (GLOW in Asia XIV), Hong Kong, March 6–8, 2024. [Poster]

Logophoricity

Kim, T. Hendrik. The relevance of logophoric conditions to the interpretation of the Korean anaphor caki. Talk presented at California Semantics and Pragmatics (CUSP) 9, Santa Cruz, CA, October 21–22, 2016. [Handout]

Co-speech gestures

Kim, T. Hendrik and Cara Feldscher. Semantically-constrained gestures: A case study of English yay (yea). Talk presented at the Expression, Communication, and the Origins of Meaning Research Group (ECOM) workshop, "What’s the point?: Pointing and Gestural Communication", University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, March 6–8, 2015. [Slides]

Degree semantics

Kim, Taehoon. The Korean Morpheme (i)na and Degree Modification of Measure Phrases. Talk presented at the 15th Harvard International Symposium on Korean Linguistics (ISOKL), Cambridge, MA, August 3–4, 2013.
Kim, Taehoon. Semantics of Korean Degree Delimiters. Poster presented at the 22nd Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, Tachikawa, Tokyo, Japan, October 12–14, 2012.

Misc.

Kim, Taehoon. How does distributivity induce emphasis? Talk presented at the Semantics Workshops of the American Midwest and Prairies (SWAMP) 2012, East Lansing, MI, October 27, 2012.
Kim, Taehoon. Semantics of Korean Multiple Nominative Constructions. Talk presented at the 14th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG), Seoul, South Korea, August 6–9, 2012.

Teaching

2022–2023. Teaching Fellow, Department of Linguistics at UCLA.
2019–2022. Lecturer, Department of English at Korea Military Academy.
2017–2018. Teaching Associate and Fellow, Department of Linguistics at UCLA.
Summer 2017. Instructor, Department of Linguistics at UCLA.
2016–2017. Teaching Assistant, Department of Linguistics at UCLA.
2013–2015. Teaching Assistant, Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University.

Last Update: