Dorothy Ahn
Rutgers University
Dorothy Ahn is an Assistant Professor at the Linguistics Department at Rutgers University. She earned her PhD in Linguistics in 2019 from Harvard University. Her research investigates how the distributional and interpretive patterns of expressions derive from their underlying meanings. She is particularly interested in the mechanism of reference and referential dependency within and across sentences and has investigated related topics including definiteness, deixis, anaphora, and pronoun resolution. She is also interested in the semantic composition across modalities, specifically how gestural elements compose with the rest of the linguistic content in both spoken and signed languages.
Minju Kim
Claremont McKenna College
Minju Kim is Professor of Korean and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Claremont McKenna College. She received her Ph.D. in Korean Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and her M.A. and B.A. from Yonsei University. Her research interests include grammaticalization, pragmatics, discourse-functional linguistics, language education, and language and gender. Her research draws on empirical data ranging from diachronic corpora dating back to the fifteenth century, when the Korean alphabet was created, to synchronic corpora of present-day Korean, including natural conversation data. Using these datasets, she investigates language change in Korean, focusing primarily on the emergence and evolution of grammatical and discourse markers, and explains these developments through textual and cross-linguistic evidence. She has published widely in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Studies, Linguistics, and Studies in Language, and is the author of Grammaticalization in Korean: The Evolution of the Existential Verb (2011). A recipient of a Korea Foundation Research Grant, she currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Korean Language in America, the journal of the American Association of Teachers of Korean, and previously served as President of the International Circle of Korean Linguistics.
Daiko Takahashi
Tohoku University
Daiko Takahashi earned his MA in English linguistics from Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and his PhD in linguistics from the University of Connecticut. After serving as a visiting assistant professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he joined the faculty at Tohoku University. He is currently a professor in the Department of Theoretical Linguistics and serves as the head of the International Graduate Program in Language Sciences. Specializing in syntax, his research focuses on syntactic theory and comparative syntax within the framework of generative linguistics. He is particularly interested in the phenomena of dislocation and ellipsis in natural languages, exploring core questions such as why certain types of ellipsis occur in some languages but not others, whether hidden syntactic structures exist within elliptical sites, and why extracting elements out of elided constituents can be more restricted—or conversely, more permissible—than extraction out of non-elided structures.
Link to the slides: Comparative Syntax of Reduced Questions in Japanese and Chakhar Mongolian
Jae DiBello Takeuchi
Indiana University Bloomington
Jae DiBello Takeuchi is Associate Professor of Japanese and Coordinator of the Japanese Language Program in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. Dr. Takeuchi conducts research in Japanese sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, second language acquisition, and foreign language pedagogy. She studies the experiences of Japanese second language speakers who are long-term residents of Japan. She is particularly interested in how they navigate Japanese speech styles, such as dialects and keigo, which they encounter in local communities, workplaces, and leisure activities. Some of these findings are presented in her book, Language Ideologies and L2 Speaker Legitimacy: Native Speaker Bias in Japan. She also studies linguistic microaggression and considers how speaker identity and markers such as accent impact L2 speakers’ acceptance in Japanese communities. More recently, she has been examining generative AI from the standpoint of Japanese sociolinguistics. At Indiana University, Dr. Takeuchi teaches courses in Japanese language and sociolinguistics. Before coming to Indiana, she taught Japanese at Clemson University and served as the director of the Languages and International Business program. In 2026, she is the president-elect of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese.