William O’Grady – Department of Linguistics (2024)

Academic Background:

B.A. University of Prince Edward Island
M.A. Université Laval
M.Ed. Harvard University
Ph.D. University of Chicago

What follows:

1. A brief summary of my principal interests

2. A list of books

3. A curated list of materials relating to emergentism, language revitalization (inluding Jejueo), and other topics

1. Interests:

My primary research interests fall into several areas, including syntactic theory, language acquisition, Korean, and heritage languages. Most recently, I have become interested in language-related AI, with special attention to its relevance to the syntax, semantics and acquisition of natural language and vice versa.

My work on syntactic theory and on language acquisition focuses on emergentism—the idea that the complex systems arebest understood by investigating the interaction of more basic forces and propensities. In the case of language,these factors seem to consist largely ofprocessing pressures,which play a key role in shaping the properties of grammatical systems, the manner in which those propertiesemerge in the course of development and are lost in the case of impairment, and the way in which they are distributed cross-linguistically. They may well also be relevant for the creation of more ‘natural’ AI-based language models.

Syntactic Carpentry(published in 2005 by Erlbaum) provides an outline of an emergentist approach to syntax, 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 theme is pursued and refined in several of the papers that can be downloaded from this site. The Handbook of Language Emergence (Erlbaum, 2015),co-edited with Brian MacWhinney, offers a broader perspective on emergentist work in cognitive science in general. A new book on this subject, Natural Syntax: An Emergentist Primer,is available for downloading from this site (see below).

My research on Korean is relatively wide-ranging, beginning withCategories and Case(1989). I maintain an ongoing interest in case-related phenomena as well as processing and acquisition, and I have co-authored (with Miho Choo) 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 (The Sounds of Korean, University of Hawaii Press, 2003). I have also co-authored a book on Jejueo, the language of Korea’s Jeju Island (with Changyong Yang and Sejung Yang).

Finally, I have a strong interest in the acquisition and maintenance of ‘heritage languages’—a broad category that includes both the family languages of immigrants to America (e.g., Korean) and endangered indigenous languages around the world. I am particularly devoted to the preservation and revitalization of Jejueo.

2. Publications (books)

• Natural Syntax: An Emergentist Primer (3rd ed.) Available for downloading from this site; see below.
• Jejueo: The Language of Korea’s Jeju Island. (co-authored with Changyong Yang &Sejung Yang). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 2019.
• Jejueo-1 (an introductory textbook for teaching and learning Jejueo, co-authored with Changyong Yang & Sejung Yang). Seoul: Kyobo, 2017. [Available at:http://pod.kyobobook.co.kr/newPODBookList/newPODBookDetailView.ink?barcode=1400000285480&orderClick=KBC]
• Handbook of Language Emergence. (co-edited with Brian MacWhinney). Boston: Wiley. 2015
• 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). Ninth edition. Toronto: Pearson-Longman, 2021. (The U.S. edition of this book, co-edited with J. Archibald, M. Aronoff & J. Rees-Miller and entitledContemporary 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.

3. A curated list o f papers and a book available for downloading as PDF files (see also researchgate.net and academia.edu)

3.1 If you’re interested in emergentism:

Thisfollowing monograph draws on materials from my classes, talks and publications, as well as on new ideas that reflect my current thinking about language and emergence.

Natural Syntax – An Emergentist Primer (3rd ed., 2022)

Intended for a quite general audience, it consists of 15 short chapters, each focused on the role of emergence in shaping language and its acquisition. This latest edition incorporates a number of revisions and clarifications, especially in chapters 11 and 12 and in the appendix on the that-trace effect.

An introductory talk on the book was presented as part of the ABRALIN lecture series on October 18, 2021. It can be accessed here:https://aovivo.abralin.org/lives/william-ogrady/.

An article summarizing some of the book’s key points appears in The Cambridge Handbook of Working Memory and Language (2022).

Working Memory and Natural Syntax (2022)

The following two published papers focus on typology – the first on ‘alignment’ (the contrast between accusative and ergative language) and the second on symmetrical voice (a defining property of many Austronesian languages).

The Syntax of Alignment (2022-R)

Symmetrical Voice in Western Subanon (2019-R, co-authored with Sharon Bulalang)

For those working in the field of second language acquisition, the following paper (published in 2022 in a volume honoring the late Michael Long) may be of interest. The central thesis of the paper is thattransfer is best seen as a processing-driven strategy that seeks to minimize the burden on working memory:L2 learners transfer operations from their L1 to the L2, unless those operations are more costly in the L2 than in the L1.

A Calculus for L1 Transfer (2022)

The following older papers, some of which were written for a general audience, may also be of some interest:

• **Processing determinism. This paper, whichappeared inLanguage Learning65 in early 2015, outlines an emergentist, processing-based approach to understanding linguistic development.
• 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 theProceedings. It focuses almost entirely on the problem of first language acquisition.
• Interview on emergentism.This interview, conducted by Mei Yang of South China University of Technology, appeared in Chinese inThe Foreign Modern Language Quarterly, 32.4, 121-28 in 2009.

3.2 If you’re interested in Jejueo or language revitalization, the following material may be helpful:

For a quite detailed description of Jejueo, you may wish to read the chapter (co-authored with Sejung Yang and Changyong Yang) that appears in TheCambridge Handbook of Korean Linguistics (2022). The chapterincludes a sketch grammar, and explains why Jejueo is a distinct language, not a dialect. It draws heavily on the material in our 2020 book, Jejueo: The Language of Korea’s Jeju Island,, published by the University of Hawai’i Press.

Jejueo – Korea’s Other Language (2022)

A 2018 interview on the plight and future of Jejueo that appeared on the Arirang network can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_UiG41C7QE

A 2023 talk on Jejueo at the Nam Center for Korean Studies at the University of Michigan can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDVXroANe-Y

Language revitalization is a very challenging enterprise, and often falls short of the community’s wishes even when immersion programs are established. For a discussion of a very serioius challenge confronting immersion programs, see the paper below, which focuses on Māori, Kaqchikel (a Mayan language), and Western Subanon (a Philippine language). The paper is co-authored with Raina Heaton, Sharon Bulalang and Jeanette King.

The Role of Input in Language Revitalization (published in Language Documentation and Conservation, 2021)

Some other papers on Jejueo and language revitalization

• Revising the language map of Korea (co-authoredwith C. Yang, S. Yang, N. Hilton, S. Kang & S. Kim). Revising the language map of Korea. In S. Brunn & R. Kehrein (eds.), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map. Berlin: Springer. 2018.
• The linguistics of language revitalization: Problems of acquisition and attrition.In K. Rehg & L. Campbell (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, 490-509. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Assessing language revitalization: Methods and priorities. Annual Review of Linguistics 4, 317-36, 2018.
• Language acquisition and language revitalization. (co-authored with Ryoko Hattori).Language Documentation and Conservation 10, 46-58, 2016.

3.3 Other papers on various topics (those preceded bya double asterisk have a specifically emergentist focus):

• An asymmetry in the acquisition of relative clauses: Evidence from Tagalog. First Language, 2019.
• More relativization asymmetries: Children find locative and benefactive clauses difficult. (co-authored with
• The syntax of priming (Commentary).Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40, 38-39, 2018.
• **Working memory and language: From phonology to grammar. (Commentary).Applied Psycholinguistics 38, 1340-43, 2017.
• **The role of salience in linguistic development: A contrarian view(with Kitaek Kim & Chae-Eun Kim). In Salience and SLA, edited by S. Gass, P. Spinner & J. Behne. New York: Routldege, 2017.
• **Working memory and language: From phonology to grammar. (Commentary on ‘Variations in Phonological Working Memory: Linking Early Language Experiences andLanguage Learning Outcomes’ by L. Pierce, F. Genesee, A. Delcenserie & G. Morgan), to appear inApplied Psycholinguisticsin 2017
• The status of syntactic ergativity in Kaqchikel. (co-authored with Raina Heaton & Kamil Deen). Lingua 170, 35-46.
• **Processing cost and its consequences. (Commentary on ‘The now-or-neverbottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language’ by M. Christiansen & N. Chater).Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39, 2016.
• Asymmetry in children’s comprehension of raising. (co-authored with Jinsun Choe).Journal of Child Language 44, 752-65, 2017.
• **Asymmetries in children’s production of relative clauses: Data from English and Korean (co-authored with Chae-Eun Kim). Journal of Child Language 42, 1-34, 2016.
• **Anaphora and the case for emergentism.This chapter, which appeared in theHandbook of Language Emergence(co-edited by Brian MacWhinney; published by Wiley in early 2015) presents an emergentist analysis of several core properties of anaphora.
• **Language development: Emergentist theories. InJ. Wright (ed.), theInternational Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., 2015.
• **Frequency effects and processing.Journal of Child Language 42, 294-97, 2015.
• **The illusion of language acquisition. This keynote article (Approaches to Bilingualism3, 253-85, 2013) outlines a processing-based theory of language acquisition built around the idea that development is best understood as a side-effect of the processor’s attempts to improve its own functioning.
• **Facts and issues: Response to the commentaries. This is the published response to the various commentaries on my article, ‘The illusion of language acquisition,’ which appeared inApproaches to Bilingualism3 in 2013.
• **Facts and issues: Response to the commentaries–Long version. This is the longer, unpublished version of my response to the commentaries on ‘The illusion of language acquisition’; section 4 did not appearin the published version.
• **Processing and language acquisition: Reflexive pronouns in English and Korean. This is a revised version of an invited talk to the linguistics program at Sogang University in 2012. It appeared in 2013 inEnewa cengpo(Language and Information) 19, 33-59.
• **Reflexive pronouns in second language acquisition.Second Language12, 5-18, 2013. This paper was first presented as an invited talk to the 2012 meeting of the Japanese Second Language Association (J-SLA).
• **Three factors in the design and acquisition of language.Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 3, 493-99. This paper, published in 2012, discusses recent developments in minimalism and their relationship to the emergentist thesis for language, with special attention to the notions of computational efficiency and processing cost.
• **‘Language acquisition without an acquisition device.’Language Teaching45, 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.
• **‘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 Bilingualism1,63-66, 2011.
• **Fundamental universals of language. This is a slightly expanded version of a paper that appeared in 2010 inLingua 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 Acquisition33, 223-45 (2011).
• ‘Practical and theoretical issues in the study of partial language acquisition.’(with On-Soon Lee & Jinhwa Lee)Heritage Language Journal8.3, 23-40 (2011).
• **Processing, pragmatics, and scope in Korean and English. (co-authored with Miseon Lee, Hye-Young Kwak, & Sunyoung Lee).Proceedings of the 19th Japanese-Korean Linguistics Conferencem,297-311.Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information. 2011.
• Emergentism.This brief overview of emergentism appeared in 2010 inThe Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, edited by Patrick Hogan (pp. 274-76). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• A psycholinguistic tool for the assessment of language loss(co-authored 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 inLanguage Documentation and Conservation3, 100-12 and can be downloaded at HALA (see above link).
• **Want-to contraction in second language acquisition: An emergentist approach. (with Michiko Nakamura & Yaskuko Ito).Lingua118,478-98 (2008)
• **Innateness, Universal Grammar, and emergentism.Lingua118, 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 theHandbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition(pp. 139-67),edited by N. Ellis & P. Robinson and published by Routledge in 2008.
• The emergentist program.This selective survey of emergentist research on language appeared in 2008 inLingua118 (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 inThe 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 two preceding items, but considers a broader range of issues.
• A mapping theory of agrammatic comprehension deficits. (with Miseon Lee)Brain and Language92, 91-100(2005).
• The syntax of idioms. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory16, 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.

3.4 Papers specifically on Korean

• Korean subject honorifics: An experimental study.(with M. Lee & S. Huh). Journal of Pragmatics 117, 58-71, 2017
• Case in Heritage Korean.Co-authored with Kitaek Kim and Bonnie Schwartz.Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8, 252-82, 2018.
• ‘The price of politeness: Subject honorification and processing.’ (co-authored with On-Soon Lee & Miho Choo). InS.-O. Sohn, S. Cho & S-H. You (eds.),Studies in Korean Linguistics and Language Pedagogy, 154-64.Seoul: Korea University Press, 2013.
• 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. [PDF Coming Soon!]
• 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.

Some dissertations that I have supervised:

• Fahn, Sharon. 1993. The acquisition of Mandarin Chinese BA-constructions.
• Gibson, Robert. 1993. Palauan causatives and passives: An incorporation analysis.
• Kao, Rong-Rong. 1993. Grammatical relations and anaphoric structures in Mandarin Chinese.
• Choo, Miho. 1994. A unified account of null pronouns in Korean.
• Cho, Sungdai. 1995. On verbal intransitivity in Korean: With special reference to middle constructions.
• Clausen, Josie. 1995. The taxonomy, semantics, and syntax of Ilokano adverbial clauses.
• Izutani, Matuzo. 1995. Against a subjacency account of movement and empty categories in Japanese.
• Kim, Seong-Chan. 1995. The acquisition of wh questions in English and Korean.
• Yamashita, Yoshie. 1995. The emergence of syntactic categories: Evidence from the acquisition of Japanese.
• Yoshinaga, Naoko. 1996. Wh-questions: A comparative study of their form and acquisition in English and Japanese.
• Lim, Kihong. 1998. A split analysis of caki-binding in Korean.
• Wong, Cathy Sin-Ping. 1998. The acquisition of Cantonese noun phrases.
• Cho, Sookeun. 1999. The acquisition of relative clauses: Experimental studies on Korean.
• Suzuki, Takaaki. 1999. Two aspects of Japanese case in acquisition.
• Lee, Miseon. 2000. On agrammatic deficits in English and Korean.
• Chang, Jung-hsing. 2001. The syntax of event structure in Chinese.
• Kim, Kyoungkook. 2001. Korean negation and the licensing condition on negative polarity items.
• Nakamura, Michiko. 2003. Processing of multiple filler-gap dependencies in Japanese. (co-supervised with Amy Schafer)
• Tsang, Chi Chung Aaron. 2003. Transitivity in Cantonese.
• Song, Min Sun. 2003. The first and second language acquisition of negative polarity items in English and Korean.
• Lee, Sun-Young. 2003. Argument/adjunct asymmetry in the acquisition of inversion in wh-questions by English-speaking children and Korean learners of English: Frequency account vs. structural account.
• Lee, Mijung. 2004. Resultative constructions in Korean.
• Timyam, Napasri. 2005. The interaction of linguistic, pragmatic and social factors: The case of datives and ditransitives in Thai. (co-supervised with Ben Bergen)
• Kim, Jae-Yeon. 2005. L2 acquisition of transitivity alternations and of entailment relations for causatives by Korean speakers of English and English speakers of Korean.
• Shin, Kyung Sook. 2007. Processing nominal reference in English and Korean: Data from first and second language acquisition.
• Hwang, Hui-hua (Jessie). 2008. Serial verb constructions in Chinese.
• Lee, Sunyoung. 2009. Interpreting scope ambiguity in first and second language processing: Universal quantifiers and negation.
• Kwak, Hye-Young. 2010. Scope interpretation in first and second language acquisition: Numeral quantifiers and negation.
• Hunter, Hatfield. 2010. Temporal expectancy and the experience of statistics in language processing.
• Kim, So-Young. 2011. Focus particles at syntactic, semantic and pragmatic interfaces: The acquisition ofonlyandevenin English.
• Kang, Sang-Gu. 2011. English attrition in Korean-English bilingual children.
• Hattori, Ryoko. 2011. Preverbal particles in Pingelapese: A language of Micronesia.
• Kim, Jinsook. 2012. Comprehension of elided phrases in Korean and English: VP-ellipsis, null object constructions, andone-substitution.
• Choe, Jinsun. 2012. Children seem to know raising: Raising and intervention in child language. (co-supervised with Kamil Deen)
• Ko, Insung. 2012. The articulation of Korean coronal obstruents: Data from heritage speakers and second language learners. (co-supervised with Ho-Min Sohn)
• Kim, Chae-Eun. 2013. Asymmetries in the production of relative clauses: First and second language acquisition.