Texas Tech University

Min-Joo Kim

Associate Professor
Department of English
College of Arts & Sciences

What are your current research interests?

One of the things I'm currently looking at are so-called existential sentences (e.g., There is a rabbit in my garden.) and their relationship to other copular constructions (e.g., Beverly is a rabbit.; That's a rabbit!; It's a rabbit that's in my garden.). In languages like English, the same verb, be, is used in both existential sentences and other types of copular sentences, but it is not the case in other languages (e.g., Japanese, Korean). Besides, many English speakers intuit that the there in sentences like There's a rabbit in my garden is semantically vacuous but there is reason to think otherwise and why such a "dummy" subject is necessary in languages like English but not in others can tell us something about their determiner or pronoun systems and how humans use different linguistic structures to package different kinds of information (e.g., focused vs. backgrounded information). So even though these are seemingly very simple sentences, they provide a rich ground for research in theoretical linguistics as well as in philosophy of language.

What types of outreach and engagement have you been involved with?

Ever since 2007, I've partnered with Literacy Lubbock in teaching service-learning linguistics courses both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I've also served on the Executive Committee of Lubbock Korean School and frequently guest-lectured at a local elementary school to enhance young children's awareness of the importance of community service and linguistic/cultural diversity in our local communities. Additionally, I've participated in roundtable debates on immigration and female faculty's career development related matters hosted by TLPDC, not to mention regularly guest-lecturing in multicultural linguistics courses at Texas Tech. Finally, I served as Director of Linguistics for about 11 years, and in that capacity, I hosted numerous linguistics events open to the public and also got involved in various outreach efforts including visits to local high schools.

Why did you choose this field?

Actually, it happened sort of accidentally when I was taking a requirement course during one of my master's degree programs at the University of Arizona. It was an Introduction to Linguistics course, and for the first time in my life, I found myself getting goose bumps in almost every single class, and that's how I knew that linguistics was the field I should be spending the rest of my life in.

How do you define good teaching?

I believe that any good teaching should help students fulfill their full academic potential and it should be intellectually stimulating. But it also depends on who your target student is. If you're serving an undergraduate student, sometimes you may not achieve that goal immediately, and often times, the student may not realize what they have learned in your course until many, many years later, so what you can hope for is that they will someday see that they actually learned something valuable from your class and it helps them in their lives. When it comes to graduate students, good teaching should help them move onto the next level in their professional development (e.g., getting into a prestigious PhD program, landing on a good tenure-track job at a university, getting an article published in a top-class journal), but more importantly, it should enable them to become the best possible scholar they can be.

Min-Joo Kim

What is your proudest professional accomplishment?

It's hard to choose one but I'd say that the publication of my book in March this year comes close to it. This book is about the syntax and semantics of noun modifiers and the theory of Universal Grammar and it got published by Springer, and I worked on that book for about 12 years. Of course, it is not the case that I worked on it for 12 years nonstop, but at first, it started out as a small paper which got published in 2002, and then in 2012, I got the book contract with Springer after having worked on the first two chapters for two years prior to that, and then getting the book to finally see the light took me seven full years since then because of the multiple rounds of revisions I had to make, based on the anonymous reviewers' comments and the vast amount of linguistic data I wanted to account for, some of which I learned about through my own graduate-level teaching. So for me, the book testifies my strong determination to get at the truth of what I am looking at, without giving up along the way. The other thing that makes this book meaningful to me is that it provides the most comprehensive formal analysis of the syntax and semantics of noun modifiers currently available, something not easy to achieve by anyone's standards.

How do you integrate research and outreach into teaching?

For professors like myself, there is actually no clear division between research, teaching, service, and/or outreach efforts; whatever we do ultimately feeds into each other. But in recent years, I've been trying to make more conscious choices as to what kinds of service activities I should engage myself in. For example, last year, I chose to accept the invitation to serve as an editor for an international journal in linguistics without any compensation even though I knew that it'll be an extremely taxing and demanding job, because it'll help me become a better researcher, which will in turn help me become a better teacher for my students, especially for my graduate students. The same holds true of my outreach efforts. I firmly believe in linguistic and cultural diversity and community service, so by doing those things myself, I can better teach my undergraduate students about the importance of civic engagement. When I was serving as Director of Linguistics until this past December, I also chose to host numerous linguistics events that were open to the public, and in so doing, I not only enabled the linguistics students and faculty at TTU/TTUHSC visit with preeminent scholars in linguistics in person, thereby receiving valuable feedback on their own research while building important professional connections as well, but also provided useful and interesting forums for open discussions and meet-and-greet opportunities for anyone interested in linguistics. In sum, in whatever I do, I try to provide the best possible learning opportunity for anyone that I interact with, thereby helping them grow as individuals and as intellectuals.

More about Min-Joo Kim

Min-Joo Kim, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Linguistics in the Department of English. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004, and after having taught at Northwestern University as a visiting assistant professor of linguistics, she joined the Texas Tech faculty in 2005, receiving tenure and promotion in 2011.

Dr. Kim's specialization in linguistics is theoretical syntax and its interfaces with morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. And the ultimate goal of her research is to help uncover principles that govern the mapping between linguistic form and meaning; that is, how humans come to compute the intended meaning of an utterance on the basis of its form.

Dr. Kim was born and raised in South Korea, and upon receiving a B.A. in English education from Chonnam National University, she worked as a middle school English teacher for three years while pursuing an MA work in English literature. She came to the United States in 1997 to pursue an MA in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Arizona, which she completed in Spring, 1999.

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