about
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at Seoul National University. Prior to joining Seoul National, I received a PhD in Linguistics at New York University (advisor: Chris Barker) and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cognitive Studies at École Normale Supérieure (PI: Salvador Mascarenhas).
I am interested in linguistic representations of modal concepts. Enlightened by the morphosyntax of Korean modal expressions, I hypothesize that the interpretation of modality involves induction as opposed to deduction. In my latest work, I show that expected utility and certain Bayesian measure of confirmation are derived from a single mechanism, suggesting that if expected utility plays a role in the interpretation of deontic modals, then Bayesian confirmation theory is relevant to the interpretation of epistemic modals. This gives rise to an interesting explanation of the representativeness heuristic widely discussed in the psychology of reasoning. People do not adopt an irrational strategy (e.g., representativeness heuristic such as Bayesian confirmation) just because they are ignorant, but rather, they are guided by their rational decision-making strategy which unfortunately induces a fallacious behavior in reasoning.
Before I was introduced to linguistics, I was trained as an engineer at Seoul National University and received B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I worked at CDNetworks for 3 years as a software engineer, developing and maintaining user interface, download manager, peer-to-peer application, and anti-reverse engineering module. Most of my projects were carried out in C++ and inline assembly.
You can view my CV here (updated June 2024).