Na Lee

Dr. Narah Lee is a Lecturer in Korean in the School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, at the University of Queensland. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University in 2019, with a dissertation entitled 'A pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspective to subject expression in spoken Korean: With focus on first and second person.' She also holds a Master's by Research and Bachelor degrees from Sogang University in South Korea. Since December 2019, she has served as Lecturer in Korean at the University of Queensland, where she acts as an associate advisor for PhD theses, including projects on critical discourse analysis of English textbooks in Indonesia, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, centering cultural and environmental issues. In 2022-2023, she received funding from the Academy of Korean Studies for her project 'A study on the perception and realisation of politeness in Korean.'

Narah Lee's research lies at the intersection of pragmatics, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics, with particular emphasis on Korean honorifics, speech styles, intercultural pragmatics, politeness in speech acts, person reference through kinship terms, and referential choices for subjects in spoken Korean. Her key publications include the book chapter 'Pragmatic literacy through overt subjects in Korean: indexical and interactional functions' (2025, Handbook on the Korean language and literacy, Springer Nature Switzerland); journal articles 'Kinship terms in the address practices in contemporary Chinese, Korean and Japanese: a sociocultural analysis with a focus on the cases of aunts and uncles' (2025, East Asian Pragmatics), 'Relationality and the fictive use of kinship terms in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese' (2025, Contrastive Pragmatics), ''What happened to the un-omitted subjects?': Variation in referential choices for first and second person subjects in spoken Korean' (2025, Pragmatics and Society), 'Korean speakers' perception of (im)politeness across speech acts of agreement, compliment, disagreement and criticism' (2024, Linguistic Research), 'Understanding of Korean honorifics by L2 Korean learners in Australia: a socio-pragmatic perspective' (2022, Language Research), 'The pragmatic understanding of subject expression in spoken Korean: interpersonal effects of the alternation among reference forms for the expressed subject' (2022, East Asian Pragmatics), 'Overt subjects signaling floor shifts in Korean discourse' (2021, Language Research), and 'Overt subject NPs as a contrast marker in Korean discourse' (2021, Linguistic Research). She has delivered numerous conference presentations on these topics at events such as the International Pragmatics Conference and Korean Studies Association conferences.