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| Prof. Kim Jong-bok, left, poses with Dr. Hans-Christian Pape, president of the Humboldt Foundation, after being awarded the Humboldt Research Award during a ceremony in Bamberg, Germany, Friday. Courtesy of Kyung Hee University |
By Cho Jae-hyon
Prof. Kim Jong-bok of the Department of English Language and Literature at Kyung Hee University has been honored as the winner of the Humboldt Research Award during a ceremony in Bamberg, Germany, March 29, for his achievements in research on English and Korean syntax.
The prize, given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, is awarded to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of Germany.
This is the first time that a Korean scholar from the department of humanities or linguistics has been awarded the prestigious award, according to the foundation.
His main areas of expertise are Korean and English syntax.
"Prof. Kim is an international authority in the field of theoretical linguistics," the Humboldt Foundation said in a statement. "He is working in the framework of Constructional Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. His analyses are implemented in computer processable grammar."
In Germany, Prof. Kim will further develop the framework of "head-driven phrase structure grammar" and work on the comparison of Korean and German syntax, it said.
Head-driven phrase structure grammar, drawn from such fields as computer science, is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar.
Kim received 60,000 euros in prize money and will be invited to Germany to research linguistics for a year.
Holding a Ph.D. from the Linguistics Department of Stanford University, Prof. Kim has actively published books and papers on English and Korean linguistics along with Stanford University, and the Cambridge University Press and other global academic institutes.
He plans to conduct joint research on English, German and Korean linguistics with professors from Humboldt University.
