Shin-Sook Kim
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Shin-Sook Kim works primarily in comparative syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, with special reference to Korean. After studying German Linguistics at Seoul National University, Korea, she received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Frankfurt. She spent many years working in Germany before coming to the UK in 2009 to take up a Newton International Fellowship at SOAS, University of London. In 2015 - 2018, she worked on the LANGELIN project 'Meeting Darwin's last challenge: toward a global tree of human languages and genes'.

Career

• Seoul National University
  BA in German Literature and Linguistics (1987)
  MA in German Linguistics (1989)
• University of Tübingen
  Research Assistant (1996)
  Researcher (1997)
  SFB 340 "Linguistic Foundations for Computational Linguistics"
• University of Potsdam
  Researcher (1997 - 1998)
  Innovationskolleg "Formal Models of Cognitive Complexity"
• University of Konstanz
  Researcher (2000 - 2002)
  SFB 471 "Variation and Change in the Lexicon"
• University of Frankfurt
  Researcher (2002 - 2004) - Institut für Linguistik
  PhD in Linguistics (2006)
  Postdoctoral Fellow (2006 - 2008)
• School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
  Newton International Fellow (2009 - 2011)
• University of York
  Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2011 - 2015)
  Postdoctoral Research Associate (2015 - 2018)
  Lecturer (2018 - 2019)

Departmental roles

• Library Representative

Research

Overview

My research interests lie in comparative syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, with special reference to Korean. My research interests also include comparative aspects of theoretical linguistics, especially the interaction between wh-phrases and quantificational/focus elements, and the licensing of wh-in-situ. In the recent years my focus has been on negation and the licensing and interpretation of negative polarity items. I have also been interested in the syntax and semantics of clause types, and how clause types are morphosyntactically encoded. In 2015 - 2018, I worked on the LANGELIN project, investigating the structure of nominals.

Research group(s)

• Syntax and semantics research group

Collaborators

• Peter Sells

Teaching

Postgraduate

• Syntactic theory (L26M)

External activities

Invited talks and conferences

• Kim, Shin-Sook, and Peter Sells (2018). "What's Imperative about Korean Imperatives?". Workshop on Non-Canonical Imperatives, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, May 25-26.
• Kim, Shin-Sook, and Nina Radkevich (2016). "Genitive Case Drop in Korean as Compounding". Nominals Workshop, Recife, March 17-18.
• Kim, Shin-Sook (2015)."Noun-Modifying Constructions in Korean (and Japanese)". Invited presentation, Institut für Linguistik/Germanistik, Universität Stuttgart, July 2015.
• Kim, Shin-Sook, and Peter Sells (2015). "Digging Deeper into Noun-Modifying Constructions in Japanese and Korean". The 11th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL11), University of York, June 2015.
• Kim, Shin-Sook (2015). "Varieties of Noun-Modifying Constructions in Korean". Invited presentation, East Asian Linguistics Seminar, Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, February 2015.
• Brown, Dunstan, Shin-Sook Kim, and Peter Sells (2013). "Grammatical Properties Which Influence GNMCCs". Association for Linguistic Typology 10th Biennial Conference (ALT10), Universität Leipzig, August 2013.
• Kim, Shin-Sook (2012). "Wh- and NPI-Intervention Effects: Are They the Same or Different?". Invited presentation, Center for Linguistics, Nanzan University, August 2012.
• Kim, Shin-Sook, and Peter Sells (2012). "NPI Licensing by Covertly Negative Verbs in Korean". Poster presented at the 8th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL8), Universität Stuttgart, May 2012.
• Kim, Shin-Sook (2011). "Negation, Scope and Negative Polarity Items in Korean". Invited presentation, Universität Leipzig, January 2011.
• Kim, Shin-Sook, and Peter Sells (2010). "Reconstruction and Scope of Negation in Korean (and Japanese)". The 7th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL7), University of Southern California, October 2010.
• Kim, Shin-Sook, and Peter Sells (2010). "Scoping in Relation to Base Order in Japanese and Korean". The 2010 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Leeds, September 2010.
• Kim, Shin-Sook, and Peter Sells (2009). "Structures of Modality in Korean". The 2009 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Edinburgh, September 2009.
• Kim, Shin-Sook (2008). "Noun Complements and Clause Types in Korean (and Japanese)". The 18th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference, City University of New York (CUNY), November 2008.
• Kim, Shin-Sook (2007). "Expressions of 'almost' in Korean". Workshop on Japanese/Korean Semantics/Pragmatics, UCLA, November 2007.