Earticle

The study investigated the constructional frequency of Korean relative clauses, focusing on the use of syntactic and semantic information in their production. The study investigated the constructional frequency of Korean relative clauses, focusing on the use of syntactic and semantic information in their production. A corpus study was conducted by automatically extracting all kinds of Korean head-external relative clauses through Perl programming from the Sejong Korean Parsed Written Corpus. The distributional frequency of the Korean relative clauses was analyzed in terms of syntactic information (grammatical functions of head NPs) and semantic information (animacy of heads and NPs within RCs). The results show that (a) Korean relative clauses are produced in order of subject > direct object > indirect object / oblique > genitive; (b) there is a correlation of subject relative clauses with animate heads and object relative clauses with inanimate heads; (c) the effect of syntactic information is more powerful when heads and NPs within RCs do not differ in animacy, whereas the effect of semantic information is more powerful when the two NPs differ in animacy; and (d) in Korean, in a difference from many other languages, the object relative clause is used frequently with inanimate heads and inanimate NPs within RCs. To sum up, both syntactic and semantic information were found to be important factors in the frequency distribution of Korean relative clauses.

This paper aims to investigate the acquisition of Korean non-terminal suffix -ess- in conjunctive clauses with a view to finding how interlanguage tense/aspect morphology is acquired by Korean second language (KSL) learners. Korean connectives agglutinate to the medial verb and tense-aspect-modality (TAM) marking occurs in between the two: connectives and medial verbs. The point, for this paper, is the fact that TAM suffixation is deficient because it varies in the presence/absence of TAM elements depending on the connectives. For this research I categorized the connectives into three types depending on the temporalities when the obligatory past or perfective contexts are given: 1) that never take -ess-, 2) that unconditionally take -ess-, 3) that selectively take -ess-. Thirty six English speakers between the ages of 18 and 27 years participated in the study. For collection of data, written questionnaire acceptability judgment task was used. The task included both 24 target items and 24 distracter items. -ese and -lyeko was easy for most participants. By contrast, -taka and -umyen shows low accuracy rates. In terms of the connectives including -nuntey and -ciman that unconditionally take the suffix, the scores was located between the two types. The results suggest that the learners perceive the suffix -ess- as a homogeneous past tense marker and they memorized the use of -ess- as a declarative knowledge.

The present study builds up a language dataset involving multiple case-marking constructions in Korean. Exploiting the Sejong Spoken Corpus, we extracted 1,021 sentences in which the nominative marker ‘-i/ka’ or the accusative marker ‘-ul/lul’ occur twice or more. These sentences were annotated with respect to 47 linguistic parameters, which the previous studies assume to interact with multiple case-marking constructions. These parameters are divided into five subgroups: namely, (i) distribution, (ii) semantic relation, (iii) nominal category, (iv) predication, and (iv) discourse. The constructed data are numerically analyzed, and the content characteristics are also examined. The numerical analysis looks into proportion of each parameter and correlation between two parameters. The content analysis focuses on how multiple case-marking constructions are realized in naturally occurring conversations. The whole dataset constructed in this study will be readily distributed in order for other linguists to use it for their own research purposes.

This experimental study compares event completion construals of change-of-state predicates in English by L1 English and L1 Korean speakers. The Incompleteness Effect (henceforth, IE) refers to the phenomenon in which the change-of-state predicates typically entailing event completion describe incomplete events. The semantic account for IE argues that IE arises only for accomplishments, leading to the division between accomplishments and achievements. IE is attested to in Korean but not in English. Given that difference, this paper is concerned with two questions: (1) whether Korean L1 speakers are aware that accomplishments are incompatible with incomplete events in English and (2) whether contextual factors other than the semantic one are relevant to IE. The results indicate that Korean speakers are insensitive to the absence of IE in English, which is best explained by L1 transfer. The results, moreover, showed that contextual factors are relevant to IE but in a selective way. Accomplishments but not achievements were influenced by contextual factors. Lastly, the results revealed there is an intricate interplay between semantic and contextual factors: the former plays a main role while the latter plays a supplementary role.

This study investigates the differences between two honorific speech styles: the deferential and polite styles. Conventionally, it has been regarded that the deferential style is a little higher in the degree of politeness than the polite style. Also, the deferential style is known to be used in formal situations, while the polite style is used in informal situations. However, they are often intermixed in the same discourse with the same addressee; therefore it is not enough to explain their differences simply by degree of politeness or formality. From a social constructivist’s perspective, this study compares the deferential and the polite style by examining their indexical meanings and discourse functions. This study argues that the most basic indexical meaning of the deferential style is ritualized self-presentation. It is compatible with a situation when a speaker delivers information or makes an announcement, which does not require much emotional interaction with the interlocutor(s). On the other hand, the most basic indexical meaning of the polite style is soft affective stance of the speaker. The polite style is used in interactive discourses where people share affects each other. This study suggests that investigating indexical meanings of speech styles helps understanding dynamic nature of Korean honorifics.

Studies on the development of L2 negation suggest that preverbal negation is learned earlier than postverbal negation regardless of a learner’s first language background. Korean provides avenues of L2 negation research because it allows both preverbal and postverbal negative constructions. The current paper aims to propose a rank order of processing difficulty involved in different types of errors committed by learners acquiring Korean as a foreign language. Twenty-four second language learners of Korean enrolled in two intermediate courses at a university participated in this investigation. An Elicited Imitation (EI) task was administered to each learner. EI accuracy scoring showed that a higher level of processing difficulty was required in repeating post-verbally negated stimuli than in repeating pre-verbally negated ones. Five different types of errors were identified, and an implicational pattern of these error types was found. Among the five types of errors, the conversion of post-verbal into grammatical pre-verbal negation was the most frequently committed error. This indicates learners’ simplification strategy for ease of production in preverbal negation while fully processing negative meaning in a postverbal construction. The results are also consistent with the prediction made by the typological markedness theory (Dahl 1979) and Processibility Theory (Pienemann 1999, 2007) claiming that preverbal negation appears earlier in the development than its postverbal counterpart.

The meaning expressed by a spatial preposition indicates how its arguments physically relate to each other in space in English. The locations assigned by the spatial preposition on as in ‘We saw a boat on the lake’ and ‘John has a cabin on the lake’ are a surface and a side of the reference objects, respectively. The first example gives us an image that a boat is floating on the lake, but the second causes us to imagine that a cabin is near the edge of the lake. The same prepositional phrase can be used to represent different locations in these examples. Expressions containing prepositional phrases representing spatial relations such as inclusion, contact, or contiguity are prime examples of spatial expressions. This work is concerned with the semantic study of spatial expressions to identify what kinds of spatial relationships are represented via a spatial preposition. In addition, how can the same preposition represent different spatial configurations? Is it a case of ambiguity, or of generality of meaning? To find out answers of these issues, first, this study presents various spatial configurations represented by the same spatial preposition. Two main approaches are devoted to representing spatial prepositions: a monosemy-based approach (Bennett 1975; Cooper 1968; Leech 1969; Lindner 1981; Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976) and a polysemy-based approach (Brugman 1988; Brugman and Lakoff 1988; Hawkins 1984; Herskovits 1986; Vandeloise 1991). Second, this study employs zeugma to verify that different configurations of a spatial preposition have sufficient privileges to belong to a polysemy; or they are simply due to vagueness or indeterminacy. The study presents standard ambiguity tests that are used to confirm if the lexical items are really ambiguous or not; then it describes the way of meaning extension.

The aim of this paper is to investigate if Korean speakers accept internally-headed relative clauses and to decide if there are internally-headed relative clauses in Korean. To achieve the goals, we reexamined two experimental data. The results of the study showed that Korean speakers judged the grammaticality of internally-headed relative clauses around 70% of the time, suggesting that they accept the existence of internally-headed relative clauses restrictively. The results also suggest that 'defective-looking' internally-headed relative clauses observed in the early period of Korean language development seem to be 'real' ones.