Joungmok Lee

Email:

jl377@iu.edu

Office:

Global and International Studies Building, 2045

Office hours:

Office Hours by appointment only

Résumé/CV

Education

2012-2023 Ph.D., University of Hawa'i at Mānoa
Dissertation title: ‘Grammaticalization of kes constructions in Korean: Grammaticalization path and emergence of (inter)subjective meanings’ 

2005 ~ 2008 MA in Teaching Korean as a foreign language, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Seoul, Korea)  Thesis: ‘A study on semantic analysis and meaning description of ‘kipputa’-like psychological adjectives of Korean using NSM theory’ (2008)

1997 ~ 2004 BA in Korean Literature and Language, Konkuk University (Seoul, Korea) 

Research Interests

• Korean language and linguistics

• Korean language pedagogy

• Grammaticalization

Bio

Joungmok Lee is a lecturer of Korean in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures with an emphasis in Korean language and linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Before he joined the EALC department at IU, he taught Korean language courses at Penn State University, Harvard University, and the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa since 2012. He also taught Korean as a second language(KSL) at Seoul Women's University and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea before he came to the United States to earn his doctoral degree. 

His doctoral research is regarding Korean nominalized expressions such as '-nun kes' with a focus on their grammaticalization theory and their modal and pragmatic functions in natural discourse. His research focuses on nominalizers (or nominalized constructions) and how they have gone through a semantic change from a nominalizer to a modal expression, especially when used in a predicate. Diachronically, for instance, the defective noun kes derived from a lexical noun that has the meaning' thing.' By virtue of the semantic characteristic of the defective noun, which is too abstract and general to be used independently, kes needs to be used with other lexical items, often forming nominal construction with relativizer suffixes. Especially when "kes" is used in predicates, it can nominalize a verbal clause indicating an event or proposition in the sentence as a modal expression which can be described as a grammatical item (modal marker) rather than a defective noun synchronically since modality is usually denoted by predicates in Korean, the kes construction in a predicate function as a modal expression showing the speaker's attitude toward the proposition of the sentence.