Dr Kook-Hee Gil
School of English
Reader in Applied Linguistics, Graduate Director of English Language and Linguistics
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+44 114 222 0229
Full contact details
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
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My main research areas include syntax, semantics and second language acquisition.
After obtaining my BA in English Literature and Linguistics at Chungnam National University (Korea) in 1993, I came to the UK and completed all my postgraduate degrees at the University of Edinburgh: MSc in Applied Linguistics and in Speech and Language Processing in 1994 and 1995 respectively, followed by a PhD in 2000, with a thesis entitled "A formal account to Long-Distance Anaphora: the case of Korean" supervised by Ronnie Cann.
In 2001-2004, I worked as a research fellow for a AHRC funded project "Strategies of Quantification" at the University of York, before coming to Sheffield as a lecturer in Applied Linguistics in 2004.
- Research interests
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My research areas are in Syntax, Semantics and Second Language Acquisition.
My most recent research concern L2 acquisition of (wh)-quantifiers (L2 Korean and L1 English/Japanese/Chinese), L2 acquisition of bare plurals and count/mass distinction, and classroom implications by Generative SLA research. The latter kind of research has led to a number of special workshops at conferences such as AAAL (2011), GASLA (2013) and LAGB (2016).
In the past, I worked on syntactic and semantic phenomena including binding, scrambling, topic/focus. (floating) quantifiers, classifiers and wh-indeterminates, also in Second Language Acquisition regarding those linguistic phenomena.
- Publications
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Edited books
- Universal grammar and second language acquisition. Netherlands: Springer Netherlands.
Journal articles
- Fixed wh-expressions in classroom second language acquisition: databases of computational properties or utterance schemas?. Journal of the European Second Language Association, 7(1), 75-92.
- The meaning of negation in the second language classroom: evidence from any. Language Teaching Research, 23(2), 218-236. View this article in WRRO
- (Bare) plural dps and l2 acquisition: From generics to mass/count distinction and plurality. Language, 18, 25-45.
- No fear of George Kinglsley Zipf: Language classroom, statistics and Universal Grammar. Instructed Second Language Acquisition, 2(2), 242-264. View this article in WRRO
- WHAT’S IN THE TEXTBOOK AND WHAT’S IN THE MIND: Polarity Item “Any” in Learner English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(1), 91-118. View this article in WRRO
- Beyond paradigm: The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of classroom research. Second Language Research, 30(4), 551-568.
- Existential quantifiers in L2 acquisition: A feature based account’. Linguistic Approaches to Bilinguiaism, 3, 117-149-117-149.
Chapters
- Chapter 4. Second language acquisition of English plurals by Chinese learners, Language Acquisition and Language Disorders (pp. 88-110). John Benjamins Publishing Company
- 4. Poverty of the Stimulus and Language Acquisition: From Ancient Philosophy to Neuroscience, Mind Matters in SLA (pp. 52-71). Channel View Publications
- View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Introduction, Strategies of Quantification (pp. 1-12). Oxford University PressOxford
- Quantifiers: Form and Meaning in Second Language Development, Educational Linguistics (pp. 139-159). Springer Netherlands
- Issues in quantification and DP/QP structure in Korean and Japanese*, Quantification, Definiteness, and Nominalization (pp. 133-160). Oxford University PressOxford
Conference proceedings papers
- View this article in WRRO
- Research group
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I welcome PhD applications whose topics lie in L2 acquisition of syntax and semantics as well as in syntactic and semantic phenomenon aforementioned in my research profile. I have supervised on topics including L2 acquisition of article semantics and generics, mass-count distinction and plurality, prosody transfer hypothesis and null arguments.
- Teaching activities
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In the undergraduate programme, I teach Linguistic Theory, Semantics and Second Language Acquisition. For the postgraduate programme, I contribute to MA in Applied Linguistics and teach 'Introduction to Language and Linguistics', 'Introduction to Second Language Acquisition', 'Current Issues in Second Language Acquisition' and 'Research Methods'.