Earticle

Semantic features, telicity, transitivity, subject animacy, have been argued to be intimately linked to grammatical aspect and thus, influence speakers’ choice between perfective and imperfective aspect. Precisely, the values of atelic, intransitive, and animate subject are argued to increase imperfective choices relative to the other value of that factor. The goal of this study is to examine Korean speakers’ sensitivity to such links between each of the three features and grammatical aspect in English. The results found that telicity and subject animacy, but not transitivity, significantly influence Korean speakers’ aspectual choices, and that telicity is a stronger predictor of Korean speakers’ choices than subject animacy. The unexpected result with transitivity was accounted for by invoking the inherent defect in the link between transitivity and grammatical aspect through telicity and the syntactically grounded nature of the link. We also considered and argued against two alternatives: frequency-based and L1-transfer based accounts. Each of the accounts is insufficient to account for the whole of the experimental data.

The traditional generative grammarians have believed that the linguistic competence of the so-called ideal language user remains constant and hence provides quite a stable basis for linguistic theories. This study, however, adopts a formal experimental method to focus on the difference/deviation in language judgment between two language groups, Korean EFL students and non-EFL students, and explore inter-speaker variations of the same language society. Specifically, exploiting the 24 years’ Korean data of the linguistics journal Studies in Generative Grammar as experiment sentences, this study shows there is language attrition on the side of Korean EFL students. We claim that sociolinguistic factors are responsible for such inter-speaker variations, and that the most influential grammatical phenomenon that negatively interferes in the Korean grammar of Korean EFL students, is the theory of Case. The results of this study imply that inter-speaker variations should be reconsidered as meaningful source for a broader study of language.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the distinctive characteristics of the gender referring nouns, MAN and WOMAN, and their collocates depending on which register is used, i.e. written or spoken language. Collocates are words that occur near a given word, and they can provide useful insight into the meaning and usage of the words near which they occur. We employed the Corpus of Contemporary American English (henceforth, COCA) which is composed of written text (newspapers, academic journals, magazines, novels) and spoken text (broadcast). Mutual Information was used as a statistical measurement to extract collocates. The study compares the collocates of 'man, woman,' in registers of written text and spoken text from the COCA. We focused on the lexical pairs ‘man’ vs. ‘woman’ to identify participation and influence of gender difference reflecting in the media. We extracted 100 collocates for each target word and then compared their relationships by using Pajek (Ver. 4.10). The study shows that there significant differences between written and spoken text in the semantic field of collocates for the gender referring nouns. Our findings point to a fundamental asymmetry in the use of the two genders. Men are expected to be interested in fashion and public oriented settings. Compared to men, women tend to be more complex; they are family-oriented, but also they are socially involved. There are also substantial differences in patterns of collocation from written text and spoken text. This study makes a contribution to the study of register variation of gender nouns.

The purpose of this study is to investigate correlations between learning strategy use as described in the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (henceforth SILL, Oxford 1995) and the Collaborative Group Discussion* We are deeply indebted to three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions and grateful to the subjects who participated in this study. This work was supported by the Catholic University of Korea, Research Fund, 2016. ** Corresponding author 1) The CGD is credited to and based on the research on the Team Protocol Method (henceforth TPM, You 2011). 1) (henceforth CGD, You et.al. 2017), which aims to enhance students’ participation in class discussion sessions and written protocol reports. Oxford's SILL strategy rating scale is used as the primary component for measuring students' strategy use (Strategy Frame Shift, henceforth SFS) pre- and post-CGD in order to determine variations in the levels of language learning strategy use for students who have taken part in CGD sessions. The six language learning strategy groups of the SILL as detailed in Oxford (1990) are to be the basis on which the CGD's effectiveness is measured. Qualitative analysis in the form of one-on-one interviews with select students has been conducted post-CGD in order to confirm the survey results from the SILL. The study concludes that a significant level of SFS is observed between pre- and post-CGD sessions and that the CGD is effective in increasing socio-affective strategy use, thus enhancing language learning across all learners.