About

Hooi Ling Soh is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT in 1998, with a dissertation on Object Scrambling in Chinese, and her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Calgary in 1994. Her research focuses on fundamental questions in linguistics regarding innate versus acquired linguistic knowledge, investigating universal principles that govern sentence structure and interpretation across languages. Her work particularly emphasizes how aspectual information and discourse particles are represented in the mind of the speaker, with a primary focus on languages spoken in East and Southeast Asia, including Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Hmong. Her research has been supported by various foundations and institutional grants, and she has contributed extensively to the understanding of syntax, semantics, and the interface between syntax and semantics in these languages.

Research topics

• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• History

Selected publications

• On the licensing of Hmong emphatic particle li

  Journal of East Asian Linguistics · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Linguistics
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• Mandarin Chinese sentence-final de as a marker of private evidence

  Routledge eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  I present new observations regarding discourse restrictions and interpretative effects of Mandarin Chinese sentence-final de in a bare de sentence and propose an analysis of de as a discourse marker, marking “private evidence.” I then consider distributional restrictions of de in yes/no questions and show that they follow from the analysis, coupled with a specific proposal about the syntax of de, and certain standard assumptions about the syntax of yes/no questions and modal auxiliaries. The analysis has implications on the syntax of modal auxiliaries, the relation between bare de sentences and shi … de sentences, and the syntax of discourse particles. It connects de with particles that mark the speaker’s belief about whether the (evidence for the) asserted proposition is shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer and whether it is “verifiable on the spot” (e.g., German ja (Kratzer 1999, 2004; Gutzmann 2009); English parenthetical I’m telling you (Reese & Soh 2018).

  PublisherDOI

• On the discourse marker dah in Colloquial Malay (and sudah in Sabah Malay)

  Routledge eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • History
  • Linguistics

  The morpheme dah in Colloquial Malay (CM) spoken in West Malaysia has a wider syntactic distribution comparedto its counterpart sudah (an aspect marker) in Standard Formal Malay (SFM). Unlike SFM sudah, which is restricted to a pre-verbal position, CM dah may appear pre-verbally, post-verbally, and sentence-finally. I present new empirical facts on CM and argue that one must distinguish two uses of dah: one as an aspectual marker and one as a discourse marker, whose use indicates that the speaker holds a certain belief about the common ground. Whether dah is used as an aspectual marker or a discourse marker depends on its syntactic positioning. I compare the use of CM dah with sudah in Sabah Malay (SM) spoken in East Malaysia, which also may appear pre-verbally, post-verbally, and sentence-finally. While sudah has been noted to exhibit a preference to appear post-verbally in SM (Hoogervorst 2011), I show that post-verbal sudah patterns like sentence-final sudah and unlike pre-verbal sudah. The results have implications on the cross-linguistic properties distinguishing “already” from perfect aspect (Vander Klok & Matthewson 2015; Nomoto & Mohd. Farez Syinon 2019). The current analysis connects CM dah and SM sudah with Mandarin Chinese particle -le, which is known to have an aspectual or a discourse function, depending on its syntactic positioning, whether post-verbally or sentence-finally (Li & Thompson 1981). As the aspectual and discourse le have been analyzed as sharing a core meaning, with different semantic effects arising from their distinct syntactic positions (e.g., Huang & Davis 1989; Soh 2008), the current study adds two varieties of Malay to the group of languages that are fruitful to consider when determining how the syntactic positioning of a grammatical item may affect its meaning.

  PublisherDOI

• A cross-cultural study of language and cognition: Numeral classifiers and solid object categorization

  Memory & Cognition · 2022-12-21 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Malay

  2019-06-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Colloquial Malay Discourse Particle punya as a Modal Evidential

  Oceanic Linguistics · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, I present an analysis of the discourse particle punya in Colloquial Malay as a modal evidential. I claim that the use of punya indicates that the attitude holder is certain about the truth of the propositional content of the utterance and that the source of the information presented is of the inferential type. I show that the attitude holder may be the speaker or the external argument of verbs of saying and believing. The proposed analysis connects punya with epistemic modal auxiliaries such as English must and Colloquial Malay preverbal modal mesti, both of which mark the attitude holder's certainty as well as the inferential nature of the evidence for the asserted proposition. However, unlike epistemic must/mesti, which may appear in questions under certain aspectual conditions, punya cannot appear in questions. I claim that punya differs from must/mesti in who can be considered the attitude holder of the evidence/knowledge. In particular, while the attitude holder of a must/mesti statement can be a contextually relevant group that is indeterminate, this is not possible for a punya statement. I argue that this difference is the source of the contrasting behaviors of punya versus must/mesti in questions. The current analysis adds to the empirical base on the crosslinguistic patterning of the connection between modality and evidentiality and has implications on the notion of "evidential perspective shift."

  PublisherDOI

• Mandarin Chinese sentence final de as a marker of private evidence

  Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2018-03-03 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, I present new empirical observations regarding discourse restrictions and interpretative effects associated with Mandarin Chinese sentence final de in a bare de sentence. I propose an analysis of de as a discourse marker that marks “private evidence”. I then consider a prediction of the analysis regarding the distribution of de in yes/no questions. I show that the pattern of restrictions observed with de in yes/no questions follows from the proposed analysis, coupled with a specific proposal about the syntax of de, and certain standard assumptions about the syntax of yes/no questions and modal auxiliaries. Specifically, I argue that de heads a projection below TP and above a modal projection for non-epistemic modals. I then discuss apparent counter-examples to the proposed discourse restrictions and suggest that the apparent counter-examples are not bare de sentences, but rather shi…de sentences with a silent shi. The proposed analysis has implications on the syntax of modal auxiliaries, the relation between bare de sentences and shi…de sentences, and the syntax of discourse particles. It connects de with discourse particles that mark the speaker’s belief about whether the (evidence for the) asserted proposition is shared knowledge between the speaker and the hearer and whether the (evidence for the) proposition is “verifiable on the spot” (e.g., German ja (Kratzer 1999, 2004; Gutzmann 2009); English parenthetical I’m telling you (Reese and Soh 2018)).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Parenthetical "I'm telling you" as a marker of private evidence

  Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America · 2018-03-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We present an analysis of parenthetical uses of the English expression I'm telling you as a discourse particle, i.e., an expression that conveys information about the epistemic states of discourse participants with respect to the propositional content of an utterance (Zimmermann 2011). The analysis connects I’m telling you to other discourse particles that mark the speaker’s assumptions about whether the (evidence for the) asserted proposition is shared knowledge between the speaker and addressee and whether or not the (evidence for the) proposition is ``verifiable on the spot'', e.g. German ja (Kratzer 1999, 2004), Mandarin de (Soh 2018).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• SYNTAX OF WHY-IN-SITU: MERGE INTO [SPEC,CP] IN THE OVERT SYNTAX*

  2016-01-01

  article

  This paper proposes that 'why' in wh-in-situ languages (Korean, Japanese, and Chinese) is directly merged into [Spec,CP] of the clause it modifies. This proposal not only captures long-standing issues regarding the peculiarity of 'why', as opposed to other wh-phrases, but also accounts for previously unnoticed asymmetries among why-constructions. In particular, I argue that due to its initial merge position, 'why' in an interrogative clause is licensed with external merge while 'why' in a declarative clause must undergo LF-movement. This argument is supported by the non-uniform behavior of 'why' with respect to the Intervention Effiect in Korean and Japanese (cf. Beck and Kim 1997) and is further confirmed by the question-marker drop phenomenon in Japanese. Under this proposal, a puzzling divergence between Chinese and Korean/Japanese in wy-constructions is reduced to the fact that Chinese disallows A'-scrambling. The proposal also captures a syntactic parallelism between 'why' in wh-in-situ languages and 'why' in wh-fronting languages, like Italian and Irish. Among the theoretical consequences of this paper is a demonstration that a subject may scramble (cf. Saito 1985) and that string-vacuous scrambling is responsible for judgment variations concerning the Intervention Effect. * I thank Noam Chomsky, Sabine Iatridou, Shigeru Miyagawa, Norvin Richards, Ken Wexler, and very specially Danny Fox and David Pesetsky for their numerous helpful comments and extensive discussion on this paper. At various stages, this paper has also benefited from questions and comments from Joseph Aoun, Rajesh Bhatt, Cedric Boeckx, Sylvain Bromberger, Chris Collins, Paul Hagstrom, Irene Heim, James Huang, Anoop Mahajan, Luigi Rizzi, Wei-tien Dylan Tsai, John Whitman, Edwin Williams, and the audiences at the Ling-Lunch at MIT, Workshop on Wh-Movement at Utrecht/Leiden, the 77th LSA annual meeting, WAFL-1, and JKL-13. I am deeply grateful to Marcel den Dikken and two anonymous reviewers of NLLT for their detailed comments, which greatly improved the content and the presentation of the paper. I wish to thank my informants: for Korean data, Joon Yong Ahn, Yeun-Jin Jung, Youngok Ko, Youngoo Lee, Ju-Eun Lee; for Japanese data, Sachiko Kato, Masa Kuno, Nanako Machida, Hideki Maki, Shigeru Miyagawa, Shoichi Takahashi; for Chinese data, Ressy Ai, Feng-Fan Hsieh, Zhiqiang Li, Hooi Ling Soh. My gratitude also goes to Philip Monahan for his generous help in proofreading. Of course, all remaining errors in the paper are mine. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.118 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 18:00:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

  Publisher

• Aspect

  2014-02-21 · 12 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Hiroki Nomoto

  5 shared

• Meijia Gao

  4 shared

• Jenny Yi-Chun Kuo

  National Chiayi University

  3 shared

• Andrew Simpson

  University of Southern California

  2 shared

• Mei Jia Gao

  Bengbu Medical College

  2 shared

• Sylvain Bromberger

  1 shared

• Feng-fan Hsieh

  1 shared

• Cédric Boeckx

  Universitat de Barcelona

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Natural Language and Linguistic Theory Editorial Board (Dece…
• International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics (ISM…
• The 8th Triple A Workshop for Semantic Field Workers Keynote…