The 2026 Seoul International Conference on Linguistics

Theory Returns: Linguistics in the Age of AI

Venue: Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul, Korea

Dates: August 10–11, 2026

Host: Linguistic Society of Korea (LSK)

Participation: In-person

Co-hosted by

Humanities & Social Studies Digital Convergent Talent Cultivation Consortium (HUSS), Korea University
Center for Data Science in Humanities [HK 3.0 Research Center], Chosun University
A Future Talent Incubating Program for Trans-local Korean Language & Literature, Pusan National University
Humanities Research Institute, Sungshin Women’s University

Conference Description

The Linguistic Society of Korea (LSK) is pleased to announce the 2026 Seoul International Conference on Linguistics (SICOL-2026), to be held on August 10–11, 2026 at Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul, Korea.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), have transformed how language is processed, modeled, and analyzed. As AI systems increasingly simulate aspects of linguistic competence and performance, fundamental questions concerning the nature of linguistic knowledge, structure, and representation become ever more pressing.

In such a rapidly evolving intellectual landscape, theoretical linguistics assumes renewed importance. Sustained inquiry into the underlying architecture of the human language faculty—its formal properties, constraints, and explanatory principles—is indispensable for understanding both the limits and implications of AI-driven approaches to language.

SICOL-2026 aims to provide a forum for rigorous investigation of the essential properties of human language, encouraging contributions that engage foundational questions of linguistic theory, formal modeling, and empirical methodology in dialogue with contemporary developments in AI.

Invited Speakers

Jennifer Cole

Professor, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University

Jennifer Cole is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the phonology and phonetics of prosody—the intonation and temporal patterns of spoken language—and how prosody encodes sentence structure, communicative intentions, and the dynamics of social interaction. She employs computational and statistical methods to model prosody in experimental and corpus data, with an emphasis on automated analysis of large, multi-talker datasets across diverse languages. She has pioneered the use of crowd-sourced perceptual ratings as a basis for building cross-linguistic models of prosody. Her current work includes collaborative projects on prosody in individuals with autism and neurological speech disorders, as well as the development of open, scalable, data-driven infrastructure for collaborative language science research. For more information, visit her homepage and the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab.

Talk: Continuity and the emergence of the discrete: Intonation and its meaning

Hanjung Lee (이한정)

Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University

Hanjung Lee (PhD 2001, Stanford University) is Professor of English Linguistics at Sungkyunkwan University. She previously held a research position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and a faculty position as Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA. Her research interests lie at the interface of grammar, semantics, and pragmatics, with a particular focus on how linguistic form shapes interpretation and patterns of language use. Her research combines theoretical modeling with experimental and corpus-based methods, and her work has appeared in leading journals including Language (2024), Journal of Linguistics (2022, 2016), Journal of Pragmatics (2013, 2007), Cognition (2007), and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (2003).
She is also the author of the book Artificial Intelligence and Linguistic Imagination: A New Paradigm in Linguistic Research (2025, Sungkyunkwan University Press) and the forthcoming monograph Polysemy in Semantics with Contextualized Language Models: Distribution, Boundaries and Interpretation of Polysemous Senses (Topics in English Linguistics 124, De Gruyter Brill). In these works, she develops a large-scale, usage-based account of verbal polysemy and meaning construction using contextualized language models and experimental methods.
Her recent research has increasingly focused on developing empirically grounded models of meaning that integrate pragmatic theory with experimental design and computational approaches.
For more information, visit her homepage and the SKKU Language and Cognition Lab.

Talk: How Linguistics Can Contribute to LLM Development, and Vice-Versa: Insights from Fine-Tuned Models’ Polysemy Processing

Hana Filip

Professor, Department of Linguistics III (Semantics and Pragmatics), Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf

Hana Filip is a Professor of Semantics at Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf. Her research explores the conceptual foundations of semantics, integrating logical/formal and cognitive traditions. She specializes in aspect, genericity, the mass/count distinction, and the interaction between noun phrase semantics and verbal aspect. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley, and her dissertation, Aspect, Eventuality Types and Noun Phrase Semantics, was published in the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series. Prior to her current role, she held faculty positions at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and the University of Rochester, and worked as a computational linguist at SRI International and ICSI at Berkeley. Her recent research, including the DFG-funded project on the "Individuation of Eventualities and Abstract Things," continues to advance the study of semantic interpretation across diverse languages such as English, German, and various Slavic languages. For more information, visit her homepage

Talk: Telicity: Incremental Relations and Scales

Roberto Zamparelli

Professor, Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento

Roberto Zamparelli is an Associate Professor at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC), University of Trento. A leading figure in formal semantics and the syntax of Noun Phrases (DPs), his recent research bridges the gap between theoretical linguistics and generative AI. In his 2025 work, "Doing Linguistics in the GPT era," he explores how the linguistic competence of Large Language Models (LLMs) compares to human cognition, advocating for the use of "human-sized" training data (e.g., the BabyLM challenge) to probe the limits of data-driven approaches.
His current projects, including REPLAI (Repetition Experiments as Probes on Linguistics Analysis and Integration) and TREiL, investigate how computational models can identify multilingual political views and handle complex multimodal data. By integrating classic formal analysis with modern LLM-based methodologies, his work offers a new paradigm for understanding language evolution, semantic shifts, and the cognitive foundations of grammar. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and is a frequent contributor to major journals in both theoretical and computational linguistics. For more information, visit his homepage.

Talk: AI and Linguistics: A Critical Overview

Program

⭐SICOL2026 Program (with moderators) [📄SICOL2026 Proceedings]

Day 1 — Monday, August 10

09:00–09:20	Opening
09:20–10:20	Invited Talk 1: Roberto Zamparelli
10:20–10:30	Coffee Break
10:30–12:00	Session 1 (parallel tracks A · B · C)
12:00–13:30	Lunch
13:30–14:30	Invited Talk 2: Hana Filip
14:30–16:00	Poster Session 1
16:00–17:30	Session 2 (parallel tracks A · B · C)

Opening · 09:00–09:20 · Sungshin Building, #110

Invited Talk 1 · 09:20–10:20 · Sungshin Building, #110

AI and Linguistics: A Critical OverviewRoberto Zamparelli

Session 1 · 10:30–12:00

Poster Session 1 · 14:30–16:00 · Soojung Building, #107

#9 Agree to Disagree? Anne Mette Nyvad

#14 Hedging Across Genres and Genders: Task and Gender Patterns in Korean EFL Learners’ Hedging Strategies Kenn Arcenal, Jeeyoung Park

#19 Syntactic and Pragmatic Asymmetries of the Left-Peripheral Discourse Operator Shenme ‘what’ in Mandarin Chinese: From Partial Filtering to Total Blocking Barry Chung-Yu Yang

#26 Non-observance of Gricean Maxims by Native and Non-native English Speakers: A Pragmatic Analysis of Tennis Press Conferences Yun-Chen Tsai, Shelley Ching-yu Depner

#30 On the Semantics and Syntax of Taiwanese V kah Exclamatives Rui-heng Ray Huang

#37 Typological Analysis and Microvariation Birgit Alber, Eirini Apostolopoulou, Nick Kalivoda

#43 Victimhood as Process: A Critical Discourse and Systemic Functional Study of Trauma, Identity and Agency Mourtzanou Evangelia

#48 Optimization in English Diachronic Syntax: A Minimalist Third-Factor Approach Sungkyun Shin

#51 The Cognitive Mechanism of Foregrounding in Korean Double Nominative Constructions: Focusing on the Nominative Case Marker -i/ga Minseop Song

#53 Mapping Argumentative Cohesion in the Age of AI: A Toulmin × Conjunctive Adverb Analysis of Korean EFL Student Writing and LLM Output So-Young Kang

#60 From Competence to Performance: Do LLMs Understand Cantonese Sentence-Final Particles? Yunqing Zhao, Lok Yiu Yeung

#72 Comparative Correlatives and Akin Constructions in Portuguese Rui Marques

#73 Revisiting the A-A’ Distinction in Korean Long-Distance Scrambling Daniel Plesniak

#89 Gradient Complementhood in Russian Prepositional Verbs: Evidence from Diagnostics Elizaveta Kardovskaia

#91 LLM-Generated Manipulative Influence: A Pragmatic Analysis of Compliance-Gaining Discourse in Korean and Russian Daria Sergienko

#105 Linguistic and Cognitive Profile of Children Raised in Intentional Bilingualism: Insights from Cross-Group Comparison Weronika Araszkiewicz, Alicja Jeleń, Zofia Kordas, Magdalena Łuniewska

Session 2 · 16:00–17:30

Session 2A · Sungshin Building, #110

16:00–16:30 Predicting Aphasia Severity and Type Post-Stroke Using Structural MRI and Machine Learning Olga Buivolova, Yuan Wei, Victor Karpychev, Roman Cheremin, Natalia Ermakova, Georgii Gorshkov, Jana Kokoreva, Alexey Petrushevskii, Ksenia Radusheva, Ilia Smirnov, Olga Soloukhina, Sergey Subbotin, Dmitry I. Ignatov, Olga Dragoy
16:30–17:00 The Role of Attentional Mechanisms in Shaping Verbal and Nonverbal Communication in Boys with ASD Alina Minnigulova

Session 2B · Sungshin Building, #212

16:00–16:30 Can LLMs Retrieve Variation? A Corpus-RAG Study of Native-Speaker Norm Drift in English as a Lingua Franca Dialogue Seongyong Lee, Jaeho Jeon, Yonhee Chung
16:30–17:00 Negotiating East Asian Identities Through English: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Japan, China, and Korea Miki Tanaka, Qin Xu
17:00–17:30 Personae Through Sensory Evaluation in Taiwanese Coffee Discourse Richard Huang

Session 2C · Sungshin Building, #213: [HK Symposium I] Computational Tools for Naturalistic and Experimental Child Language Research

16:00–16:30 Lexical and Semantic Evaluation of Whisper-Based Automatic Transcription of Korean Child-Directed Speech Ioana Buhnila, Jiho Lee, Sung Hyu Chon, Jae-Hun Jung, Eon-Suk Ko
16:30–17:00 Human-Speech Detection in Naturalistic Child-Centered Audio using an Interpretable Open-Source Ensemble Voice Activity Detection Approach Jun Ho Chai, Eon-Suk Ko
17:00–17:30AutoHPP: An automated system for head-turn preference procedure using a deep-learning-based infant head-turn classifierDongjin Lee, Michael C. Frank, Jae-Hun Jung, Eon-Suk Ko

Day 2 — Tuesday, August 11

09:00–10:00	Invited Talk 3: Jennifer Cole
10:00–10:10	Coffee Break
10:10–11:40	Session 3 (parallel tracks A · B · C)
11:40–13:10	Lunch
13:10–14:10	Invited Talk 4: Hanjung Lee
14:10–15:40	Poster Session 2
15:40–17:10	Session 4 (parallel tracks A · B · C)
17:10–17:30	Closing