William O'Grady

Department of Linguistics University of Hawai‘i at Manoa 1890 East-West Road, Moore Hall 569 Honolulu, HI 96822 Office: Moore Hall, Room 565 E-mail: ogrady@hawaii.edu Phone: (808) 956-3228

Academic Background

B.A. University of Prince Edward Island
M.A. Universite Laval
M.Ed. Harvard University
Ph.D. University of Chicago

Interests

My primary research interests fall into three areas—syntactic theory, language acquisition, and Korean.

My current work on syntactic theory focuses on emergentism—the idea that the properties of language are best understood in terms of the interaction of more basic, nonlinguistic forces. My research concentrates on the role of the processor, which I take to lie at the heart of the human language faculty and to be responsible for most (perhaps all) of the facts traditionally attributed to Universal Grammar. Syntactic Carpentry (published in 2005 by Erlbaum) provides a detailed outline of this idea, illustrating how many core ‘grammatical’ phenomena can be traced to the operation of an efficiency-driven processor whose primary goal is simply to reduce the burden on working memory.

My research in the field of language acquisition encompasses problems of learnability and development. My recent views on learnability are outlined in Syntactic Carpentry, which proposes that the processor allows language learners to overcome deficiencies in the input that are traditionally interpreted as evidence for an inborn Universal Grammar. My work on developmental phenomena has for the most part focused on Korean and Japanese, but I have also written a book for a general audience on the acquisition of English?How Children Learn Language (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

My research on Korean is relatively wide-ranging. I maintain an ongoing interest in case-related phenomena as well as processing, and I have co-authored a bilingual ‘root dictionary’ of Korean (The Handbook of Korean Vocabulary, University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996) as well as a book on Korean phonology for second language learners (The Sounds of Korean, University of Hawaii Press, 2003).

Where I'll be--upcoming talks

• 2009 Heritage Language Research Institute, University of Illinois, June 22-25.
• World Alphabet Conference, Seoul, Korea, October 2009, exact dates to be determined.

Selected Publications (books)

• Principles of Grammar and Learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
• Categories and Case: The Sentence Structure of Korean. Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991.
• Handbook of Korean Vocabulary (co-authored with M. Choo). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996.
• Syntactic Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• Studies on Korean in Community Schools (co-edited with D.-J. Lee, S. Cho, M. Lee, & M. Song). Technical Report 22. Honolulu: Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center, 2000. (This is a collection of reports, written in Korean by my then students, summarizing our research on 'heritage' learners of Korean in the United States.
• The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide (co-authored with M. Choo). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003.
• Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: An Introduction (co-edited with J. Archibald). Sixth edition. Toronto: Pearson-Longman, 2008. (The U.S. edition of this book, co-edited with J. Archibald, M. Aronoff & J. Rees-Miller and entitled Contemporary Linguistics, is published by St. Martin’s Press.)
• How Children Learn Language. London: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2005.

The following papers are available for downloading as PDF files.

• ‘The syntax of idioms.’ This paper appeared in 1998 in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 16.
• ‘Words and Sounds.’ This invited talk to the International Association for the Promotion of Korean as an International Language (2001) discusses two books that I co-authored that are of special interest to Korean language professionals.
• ‘An emergentist approach to syntax.’ This paper, first written in early 2001, summarizes many of the points developed in more detail in my 2005 book, Syntactic Carpentry (Erlbaum). It was subsequently revised and updated for publication in The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, edited by H. Narrog & B. Heine.
• ‘Language without grammar.’ This is the revised version of my plenary talk to the 2003 annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C. It appeared in 2008 in the Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, edited by N. Ellis & P. Robinson, and published by Routledge.
• ‘Rethinking structure and case.’ This is the text of my 2004 talk to the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of Korea; it is virtually identical to the version that appears in the conference proceedings.
• ‘A linear computational system for Korean: Case and structure.’ This paper is also available in Perspectives on Korean Case and Case Marking, ed. by Byung-Soo Park & Jong-Bok Kim. Seoul: Thaehaksa, 2004, 3-20.
• ‘A mapping theory of agrammatic comprehension deficits.’ (with Miseon Lee) Appeared in Brain and Language, 2005.
• ‘The interpretation of inverse scope in Korean.’ (with Sunyoung Lee) Talk presented at the fifteenth meeting of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics (ICKL) held at the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara, June 2006.
• ‘The syntax of quantification in SLA: An emergentist approach.’ This is my plenary talk to the 2006 GASLA conference; it can be downloaded at http://www.lingref.com/cpp/gasla/8/index.html. It also appears in Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2006): The Banff Conference,, ed. by M. O’Brien, C. Shea, & J. Archibald. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 2007, 98-113.’
• ‘Classifiers and learnability: The role of recasts.’ (with Sunyoung Lee) Frontiers of Korean Language Acquisition, ed. by Jae Jung Song. Saffron Books: London, 2006,127-37.
• ‘The emergentist program.’ This overview of the emergentist program for language appeared in 2008 in a special issue of Lingua, edited by Roger Hawkins and devoted to an examination of emergentist and UG-based work on second language acquisition.
• ‘Want-to contraction in second language acquisition: An emergentist approach.’ (with Michiko Nakamura & Yaskuko Ito): Appeared in Lingua, 2008.
• ‘Innateness, Universal Grammar, and emergentism.’ Appeared in Lingua , 2008.
• ‘Emergentism.’ To appear in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, edited by Patrick Hogan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• ‘The problem of verbal inflection in second language acquisition.’ This is the text of an invited talk that I gave at the 2006 meeting of the Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics in Kangwondo, Korea. It will appear in the Journal of the Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics.
• ‘Interpreting experience: Clues from the study of language acquisition.’ This is the text of an invited talk that I gave at the Malaysia International Conference on Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (MICOLLAC) in May of 2007. It will appear in the conference proceedings.
• ‘Does emergentism have a chance?' This is my plenary talk to the 32nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (November 2007). It will appear in the Proceedings.
• ‘Emergentism and Second Language Acquisition.’ This paper, co-authored with Miseon Lee and Hye-Young Kwak, offers on overview of recent emergentist work on second language acquisition, including new work on quantifier scope. It will appear in W. Ritchie & T. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquistion (Emerald).
• ‘Practical and theoretical issues in the study of partial language acquisition’ (co-authored with On-Soon Lee and Jinhwa Lee). This is the text of my talk to the 2008 Heritage Language Summer Institute at Harvard University.
• ‘Some issues in Korean syntax and processing: Rethinking scope’ (with Sunyoung Lee). Invited talk presented at the sixteenth meeting of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics (ICKL) held at Cornell University, June 2008.

Some dissertations that I have supervised:

• Fahn, Sharon. 1993. The acquisition of Mandarin Chinese BA-constructions.
• Gibson, Robert. 1993. Palauan causatives and passives: An incorporation analysis.
• Kao, Rong-Rong. 1993. Grammatical relations and anaphoric structures in Mandarin Chinese.
• Choo, Miho. 1994. A unified account of null pronouns in Korean.
• Cho, Sungdai. 1995. On verbal intransitivity in Korean: With special reference to middle constructions.
• Clausen, Josie. 1995. The taxonomy, semantics, and syntax of Ilokano adverbial clauses.
• Izutani, Matuzo. 1995. Against a subjacency account of movement and empty categories in Japanese.
• Kim, Seong-Chan. 1995. The acquisition of wh questions in English and Korean.
• Yamashita, Yoshie. 1995. The emergence of syntactic categories: Evidence from the acquisition of Japanese.
• Yoshinaga, Naoko. 1996. Wh-questions: A comparative study of their form and acquisition in English and Japanese.
• Lim, Kihong. 1998. A split analysis of caki-binding in Korean.
• Wong, Cathy Sin-Ping. 1998. The acquisition of Cantonese noun phrases.
• Cho, Sookeun. 1999. The acquisition of relative clauses: Experimental studies on Korean.
• Suzuki, Takaaki. 1999. Two aspects of Japanese case in acquisition.
• Lee, Miseon. 2000. On agrammatic deficits in English and Korean.
• Chang, Jung-hsing. 2001. The syntax of event structure in Chinese.
• Kim, Kyoungkook. 2001. Korean negation and the licensing condition on negative polarity items.
• Nakamura, Michiko. 2003. Processing of multiple filler-gap dependencies in Japanese. (co-supervised with Amy Schafer)
• Tsang, Chi Chung Aaron. 2003. Transitivity in Cantonese.
• Song, Min Sun. 2003. The first and second language acquisition of negative polarity items in English and Korean.
• Lee, Sun-Young. 2003. Argument/adjunct asymmetry in the acquisition of inversion in wh-questions by English-speaking children and Korean learners of English: Frequency account vs. structural account.
• Lee, Mijung. 2004. Resultative constructions in Korean.
• Timyam, Napasri. 2005. The interaction of linguistic, pragmatic and social factors: The case of datives and ditransitives in Thai. (co-supervised with Ben Bergen)
• Kim, Jae-Yeon. 2005. L2 acquisition of transitivity alternations and of entailment relations for causatives by Korean speakers of English and English speakers of Korean.
• Shin, Kyung Sook. 2007. Processing nominal reference in English and Korean: Data from first and second language acquisition.
• Hwang, Hui-hua (Jessie). 2008. Serial verb constructions in Chinese.
• Lee, Sunyoung. 2009. Interpreting scope ambiguity in first and second language processing: Universal quantifiers and negation.

Go to the UH-Manoa Linguistics Department Page.

Last updated on 06/16/09