My primary research interests reside in formal semantics, syntax, and their interface; my secondary research areas are formal pragmatics and language acqusition.

There are two common threads underlying my research: (i) the interplay between context and grammar, and (ii) the ways in which speakers' belief states and propositional attitudes are encoded in grammar. I have investigated the first topic by developing a constrained but flexible interpretive mechanism for a highly discourse-sensitive relative clause construction in Korean and Japanese, comparing it with free adjuncts in English ([my dissertation] [abstract]).

I have been exploring the second topic by working on the free choice phenomenon across languages (e.g., English 'any', Korean 'amwu-na/to'), which involves the semantics of indefinites, disjunction and conjunction, implicatures, modality, and attitude ascription. I am also exploring this topic by developing, with my former colleagues at Northwestern (e.g., Stefan Kaufmann and Brady Clark), a game-theoretic model of the rise of conversational implicatures and their conventionalization.

I have worked on various other topics including definite descriptions, aspect, event subordination, possessor raising, existential sentences, factivity, noun modification, and the semantics of case, examining Korean, Japanese, English, Russian, and Siuslawan (Lower Umpqua). I have also conducted research in language acquisition, developing several experiments on the acquisition of the syntax and semantics of Standard American English and African American English.