Centre of Korean Studies
Dr Cuie Xu
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Key information
Key information
- Roles
- Centre of Korean Studies Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Centre of Korean Studies
- Department
- Centre of Korean Studies
- Qualifications
- BA(Yangzhou), MA(Fudan), PhD(Seoul National)
- Email address
- cx7@soas.ac.uk
Biography
Dr Cuie Xu is a linguist and postdoctoral research associate at the Centre of Korean Studies. Her main areas of interest are Korean linguistics, Chinese linguistics, language typology and contrastive linguistics. She has considerable experience teaching Korean and Mandarin, and she is also a freelance Korean Chinese interpreter and translator.
Cuie completed her doctoral degree at Seoul National University’s Department of Korean Language and Literature in 2020, with a thesis entitled ‘Serial Verb Constructions in Korean.’ In her research, she critically examined the definition of SVCs proposed by previous research studies, uncovered problems in the syntactic and semantic criteria proposed in these studies, explored why some V1-e + V2 constructions can be seen as SVCs, and revised the definition of Korean SVCs by proposing two new criteria so that the definition suits each language’s distinctive characteristics. In addition, Cuie established an independent SVC category in Korean and explored the semantic and syntactic properties of Korean SVCs. In exploring the semantic property of Korean SVCs, she argues that ambient SVCs exist in Korean as well – a type of SVCs that has never been described before. Looking at the syntactic properties of Korean SVCs, after comparing Korean SVCs with Chinese and Paamese SVCs, she argues that among core-layer and nuclear-layer SVCs, Korean has only nuclear-layer SVCs. The factors that play an important role in this area are Korean’s word order and language type.
During her PhD studies, Cuie simultaneously worked on the Database Construction for Minority Languages in China and Russia project for more than four years. The project was funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea. She constructed databases for Baonan, Horpa, Sangkong, Yami, Bai, Nusu, Nanai, Japhug, Kam, Tatar (-cn) and Lakkja languages, based on the descriptive grammars. It was through this project that Cuie developed a strong interest in Chinese minority languages and acquired expertise in the languages listed.
Research interests
Korean linguistics, Chinese linguistics, language typology and contrastive linguistics.
