Daniel Plesniak

I received a PhD in linguistics from the University of Southern California in 2022 and am currently an assistant teaching professor in Seoul National University's College English Department. I was previously a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at SNU's Linguistics Department. My research focus is on Syntax, especially of English and East Asian languages. My dissertation was concerned with experimentally investigating the role of syntactic structure in constraining sentence interpretations in English, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese. 

More specifically, I am concerned with how to obtain robust judgements about sentences like "Every boy loves his mother" and "his mother loves every boy". The former has been said to allow a "bound" reading, namely that each boy loves his own mother, whereas the latter has been said to disallow such a reading ("each boy is loved by his own mother"). Though many people share these judgements, many do not. I show that this variation is not random, but rather, the result of experimentally diagnosable factors. Once we can identify and control for these factors, the apparent differences in judgement vanish.