Kyuwon Moon (문규원, 文揆媛)

Ph.D Candidate
Department of Linguistics,
Stanford, USA 

 

 

 

 

My primary research area is sociolinguistics, which means I study how language is related to various aspects of society. Within the realm of sociolinguistics, I am mainly interested in prosodic variation – such as intonation, voice quality – and how it interacts with segmental variation and grammatical choices. Most importantly, my research goal is to understand social meaning of language through analyzing speech patterns in various styles; I focus on how variation correlates with socially constructed identities among different speakers and style.

I tend to work on Korean, although I also like to work on English and Japanese. My recent projects involve what young, East Asian women do to make themselves desirable through their cute and sexy styles. Young women in East Asian context are interesting not only because they represent the complex social and economic change in the East Asian society, but also because they show widest variety of linguistic styles. Using media discourses and face-to-face interaction data of young speakers, I hope to show how their use of language reflects, and constructs what they are, and what they want to be.