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 564 E-mail: ogrady@hawaii.edu Phone: (808) 956-3228

Academic Background

B.A. University of Prince Edward Island
M.A. Université 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. This idea is also pursued in several of the papers that can be downloaded from this site.

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

June 1 - 2: J-SLA conference, Tokyo, Japan

June 16 - 22: Heritage Language Institute, UCLA

Selected Publications (books)

• Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2005.
• How children learn language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: An Introduction (co-edited with J. Archibald). Seventh edition. Toronto: Pearson-Longman, 2011. (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.)
• The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide (co-authored with M. Choo). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003.
• 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.)
• Syntactic Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• Handbook of Korean Vocabulary (co-authored with M. Choo). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996.
• Categories and Case: The Sentence Structure of Korean. Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991.
•  Principles of Grammar and Learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

The following papers are available for downloading as PDF files.

If you've come here to find out about emergentism or emergentist approaches to language, the following papers may be helpful:

• ‘Emergentism.’ This brief overview of emergentism appeared in 2010 in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, edited by Patrick Hogan (pp. 274-76). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• ‘Interview on emergentism.’ This interview, conducted by Mei Yang of Guangzhou University, appeared in Chinese in The Foreign Modern Language Quarterly, 32.4, 121-28 in 2009.
• ‘The emergentist program.’ This selective survey of emergentist research on language appeared in 2008 in Lingua 118 (pp. 447-64), a special issue edited by Roger Hawkins and devoted to an examination of emergentist and UG-based work on language acquisition.
• ‘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). The paper was subsequently revised and updated for publication in 2010, appearing in The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis (pp. 257-83), edited by H. Narrog & B. Heine and published by Oxford University Press. It is somewhat more technical than the preceding items, but considers a broader range of issues.
• ‘Does emergentism have a chance?' This is my plenary talk to the 32nd Boston University Conference on Language Development (November 2007) as it appeared in the Proceedings. It focuses almost entirely on the problem of first language acquisition.
• ‘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 appeared in 2009 in W. Ritchie & T. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquistion, pp. 69-88. (Emerald Press).
• ‘Language acquisition without an acquisition device.’ Language Teaching 45, 116-30 (2012). This is a simplified and heavily abridged version of my plenary talk to the 2010 Second Language Research Forum, held at the University of Maryland.

Other papers, many with an emergentist focus:

• ‘Relative clauses: Processing and acquisition.’ In Evan Kidd (ed.), The acquisition of relative clauses: Processing, typology and function, 13-38. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011.
• ‘Interfaces and processing.’ Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1, 63-66 (2011). 
• ‘Fundamental universals of language.’ This is a slightly expanded version of a paper that appeared in 2010 in Lingua 120, pp. 2707-12. 
• ‘An emergentist perspective on heritage language acquisition' (co-authored with Hye-Young Kwak, On-Soon Lee, & Miseon Lee)  Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33, 223-45 (2011).
• ‘Practical and theoretical issues in the study of partial language acquisition’ (with On-Soon Lee & Jinhwa Lee) Heritage Language Journal 8.3, 23-40 (2011).
•  ‘Processing, pragmatics, and scope in Korean and English’ (with Miseon Lee, Hye-Young Kwak, & Sunyoung Lee).  To appear in the Proceedings of the 19th Japanese-Korean Linguistics Conference.  Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
• ‘A psycholinguistic tool for the assessment of language loss’ (with A. Schafer, J. Perla, O.-S. Lee, & J. Weiting). This paper outlines a simple response-time tool for assessing language strength in bilinguals, with a view to diagnosing the potential for language loss both in individuals and in communities. It appeared in 2009 in Language Documentation and Conservation 3, 100-12 and can be downloaded at <http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/pastissues.html>.
• ‘Want-to contraction in second language acquisition: An emergentist approach.’ (with Michiko Nakamura & Yaskuko Ito): Lingua 118, 478-98 (2008)
• ‘Innateness, Universal Grammar, and emergentism.’ Lingua 118, 620-31 (2008) 
• ‘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 the Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 139-67), edited by N. Ellis & P. Robinson and published by Routledge in 2008.
• ‘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.
•  ‘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 inProceedings 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.’
• ‘A mapping theory of agrammatic comprehension deficits.’ (with Miseon Lee) Brain and Language 92, 91-100 (2005).
• ‘The syntax of idioms.’ Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16, 279-312 (1998).
• ‘Brow raise in American Sign Language: An emergentist account.’ This paper, written in 2010 and revised in 2011, outlines a possible processing-based explanation for a phenomenon central to the syntax of ASL.

Papers specifically on Korean: 

• ‘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.
• ‘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.
• ‘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.
• ‘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.