The fourth person I interviewed is doing linguistics research at Yonsei University and teaching while working on his PhD dissertation. I wanted to interview him because I am majoring in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences and wanted to learn more about linguistics research. In linguistics he is most interested in grammar, specifically morphology. He is currently preparing for his PhD dissertation, and explained to me what he is planning on researching for it. He will most likely write his dissertation about language complexity, specifically syntagmatic versus paradigmatic complexity. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic complexity can be described as horizontal and vertical, respectively. Syntagmatic complexity is seen in languages like Korean, where different endings and particles are added on to words horizontally. This is in contrast to languages with paradigmatic complexity such as French or Spanish where you have to memorize vertical conjugation tables. For his dissertation he will have to make an algorithm to calculate a language’s degree of complexity. He is planning on running a lot of different languages through this algorithm and comparing their resulting degrees of complexity, particularly focusing on comparing syntagmatically and paradigmatically complex languages and seeing how complex Korean is compared to other languages. He is interested in this topic because not very much research has previously been done on it in Korea.

As well as doing research he is also teaching a class called 언어 생활의 관찰과 이해 (which roughly translates to something like Observing and Understanding the Use of Language in Society). This class touches on a variety of topics in linguistics, including grammar, sociolinguistics, language history, and language policy. After finishing his dissertation he hopes to become a professor and continue researching and teaching. There is still a lot of grammar research that he wants to do to gain deeper knowledge about language, and since in Korea there are no specific research institutes for linguistics, in order to continue his research he must become a professor.

Through this interview I learned a lot about the process of doing linguistics research and language complexity, a topic I did not know much about before. I also learned that you can teach while doing a PhD program and about the process of doing a dissertation. He also told me about the current state of linguistics research in Korea, which I was not aware of before our conversation.