Nikolas Webster  (he/him/his)

Niko Webster

Hello, and welcome! My name is Niko, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in my 6th and final year at the UC Santa Cruz Department of Linguistics. I am a theoretical syntactician, with an empirical focus on Korean. My primary advisor is Ivy Sichel.

I have interest in the syntax and semantics of argument structure, verb decomposition, and locality. In my independent research, I have worked on or continue to work on: nominalization paradigms and argument structure in Korean, syntactic approaches to morphology, information structure effects on island extraction, presuppositionality and differential case marking, animacy biases in online processing, and the timing of post-syntactic insertion operations. I incorporate both theoretical and experimental approaches in my work.

My dissertation (exp. Spring 2026) investigates the argument structure and morphological composition of nominal and verbal predicates in Korean. I argue for the utility of loanwords as a tool to inform theories of syntax, and its interfaces with semantics and morphology. Specifically, I use loanword data in Korean to make a number of advancements in predicate composition theory, with particular attention to which syntactic heads are responsible for the licensing of internal arguments and the consequential morphological surface forms.

Prior to joining UC Santa Cruz, I received my B.A. in Linguistics from New York University (NYU), with minors in Korean Language and Studio Art. Outside of work, I enjoy crochet, video games, and Argentinian tango.

Contact: newebste [at] ucsc [dot] edu

저는 한국어를 10년쯤 동안 배워 왔습니다. 앞으로의 꾸준한 연습을 통해서 저의 한국어 능력이 개선되기를 바랍니다. 저의 한국어 문법 실수의 관한 지적과, 실력의 향상을 위한 도움을 감사히 여기고 있습니다.