York professor delivers keynote at Korean linguistics 50th anniversary

Posted on Tuesday 14 July 2026

Professor George Tsoulas of the Department of Language and Linguistic Science delivered a keynote address at the 50th anniversary conference of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics (ICKL), held at the University of Sheffield from 1 to 3 July 2026.

Founded in 1975 with 27 members, ICKL has grown into a global organisation that has held conferences on every continent. The anniversary conference included a retrospective featuring video messages from past presidents, reflecting on the society's half-century of contributions to the field.

In his keynote, "Korean Quantification and The Architecture of Scope Taking", Professor Tsoulas explored how studying Korean syntax can illuminate a familiar puzzle in English. Sentences containing quantifier expressions such as "every" and "some" are often ambiguous, and Korean grammar makes it possible to observe how these different meanings are constructed.

ICKL provides the most prominent international forum for Korean linguistics, covering all subfields of the discipline. The organisation has played a key role in promoting and helping to establish Korean language and linguistics programmes in East Asian studies departments worldwide.

The 2026 conference, themed "Variation and Diversity in Korean Linguistics", brought together established researchers and postgraduate students from around the world, reflecting the field's expansion into new areas of research and interdisciplinary collaboration.