Earticle

This study investigated Japanese-speaking learners’ integration of morphological and pragmatic information during the processing of Korean nominative case marker ‘i/ka’ in the ‘-ko siphta’ construction. In the ‘-ko siphta’ construction, ‘i/ka’ can replace an accusative marker, especially emphasizing the speaker’s focus on the theme that it modifies. In this study, we tested whether Japanese learners of Korean would show target-like sensitivity to the constraints underlying the realization of ‘i/ka’ in the online processing of the ‘-ko siphta’ construction. The results of this study indicated that the high-proficiency and lower-proficiency group showed a significant difference with the native speaker group in the acceptability judgment task. In the self-paced reading task, the high-proficiency group use their knowledge of morphosyntactic and pragmatic information in online processing but the lower-proficiency group did not. (Ewha Womans University)

This study aims to give a suggestion on the application of transmedia storytelling in English education. The increasing success of transmedia storytelling projects worldwide drew the attention of scholars and specialists in language teaching, especially English teaching. Since learners who are accustomed to using digital media, including internet, are often referred as digital natives, transmedia storytelling can be an effective teaching tool for those learners. However, before applying transmedia storytelling to English education, there are some things that need to be considered and developed. First, developing a transmedia storytelling content archive is necessary for teachers to use as teaching materials as well as for learners to use for their self-studies. Second, learning management and evaluation methods should be devised in English education for applying transmedia storytelling. Lastly, we should develop learning activities that can be used in English education classes using transmedia storytelling. Studies that have examined the effects of applying transmedia storytelling to English education should be carried out as soon as possible.

This study analyzed the relationship among beliefs about English vocabulary learning, English vocabulary strategies, and vocabulary knowledge. The participants were 84 university students in Busan, Korea. The students were questioned about their beliefs, strategies, and vocabulary knowledge as English language learners. The data collected through two sets of questionnaires (beliefs about English vocabulary learning, English vocabulary strategies) and a vocabulary level test were analyzed by using SPSS 22.0. Among the four belief categories, the participants held stronger beliefs about the importance of vocabulary learning. The results also indicated that students used discovery strategies more frequently than consolidation strategies. A significant correlation was also found between beliefs about the importance of vocabulary and the usage of the vocabulary strategies. Of the strategies, ‘Guessing from textual context,’ was significantly correlated with the student's vocabulary knowledge, in particular. The findings can be a valuable resource to consider appropriate ways of using student's perceptions to improve English vocabulary teaching and learning practice.

Contrary to the claims in McCarthy’s(2007) Optimality theory with candidate chains, this paper argues that the overapplication opacity can be explained with constraint combination without giving up parallelism or without arbitrary constraints like Prec. A complex constraint in the form of implicational constraint combination incorporates the basic principle of gradual change while maintaining the bistratal theory. This paper illustrates how an implicational combination of constraints can explain the overapplication opacity and shows the general directionality of implicational combinations. The analysis dispenses with radical changes introduced in the Optimality theory with candidate chains.

This study aims to describe music-related request patterns observed in AI assistant platforms and formalize them by using the local grammar graph(LGG) methodology. These patterns, transformed into Finite-State Transducers in the Unitex platform, allow us to automatically classify and annotate various sentences used for request, which is crucial for diverse machine learning approaches. In this study, we examined a corpus of tweet texts crawled by Deco-T-Crawler as seed data and classified music-related requests into 3 categories: music on/off, volume up/down and music-play control. Then each category was divided into sub-categories which were represented by several LGGs. By applying these LGGs and the DECO Korean dictionary on test data, we obtained the information retrieval performance. In this regard, the linguistic resources proposed in this study are proved concrete and meaningful.

The purpose of this study is to investigate authentic business English emails written by Koreans and Americans in order to identify how their emails are actually written. Despite the number of business English and email materials, most educational resources rely on authors’ subjective perspectives rather than authentic data. There is a lack of empirical studies on authentic business emails in South Korea. For this reason, this paper examines what types of lexical features are used in actual corporate emails. The Business Email Corpus(BEC) compiled for this study can be an initial stage for the invaluable database regarding a corpus-based analysis of business emails. The dataset consists of business emails in English written by Koreans(BEC_K) and Americans(BEC_A) who work for a conglomerate company in South Korea and its branch in the US. In order to examine the lexical features of business email, this study explores the similarities and differences among the BEC datasets and British National Corpus Sampler from informative texts(BNC_S).

Studies on the place of Mandarin Chinese in Motion event typology present three different views: Chinese is a satellite-framed, a verb-framed, or an equipollently-framed language. The purpose of this research is to further investigate the typological status of Chinese and to figure out the proportion of the so-called serial verb construction by analyzing the descriptive data of translational and stationary Motion events. This study has analyzed 530 Motion event clauses from 71 video reports of natural disasters occurring frequently and pervasively in daily life. The study results show that Path components are frequently conflated in the main Path verbs in modern colloquial Chinese and the frequency of the so-called serial verb construction is quite limited. Based on these findings, it is proposed that Chinese behaves more similarly to a verb-framed language rather than to either a satellite-framed or an equipollently-framed language.

The main goal of this paper is to provide an agreement-based analysis of scrambling that occurs with quantifiers. This paper argues that the probe-goal agreement analysis has advantages over the traditional Binding Theory. With respect to clause-internal scrambling, after QR, an operator c-commands its bindee at LF and it allows reconstruction. In the case of clause-external scrambling, a QP does not c-command its bindee at PF and after QR, an operator c-commands its bindee at LF. In addition, clause-external scrambling allows reconstruction. With regard to clausal scrambling, a QP does not c-command its bindee at PF and after QR, an operator c-commands its bindee at LF. In addition, clausal scrambling allows reconstruction. In this paper, the possibility of eliminating reconstruction in A’-binding has been explored. In order to eliminate reconstruction, we propose the A’-binding principle that an anaphor A or a pronoun P is licensed by an operator O only if the operator O or its trace c-commands A or P at LF. There are tangible reasons to argue for this claim.

This paper aims to address two significant concepts, Prototypicality and Markedness, in the studies of the categorization of the English passive system, and holds that there always exists vagueness at the category boundary and that the category is gradient. It proposes that the category passive, starting from the prototype of the unmarked form of the agentful true passive, extends in a chained way of concatenation to the less peripheral and less marked form of the get-passive. The category is then said to expand in the way of radiation to more peripheral, untypical and marked forms of the causative passive and to the [Be+V-able] construction and finally spreads to the most peripheral and marked form of the [V1+V2-ing] construction. It is also suggested that great importance should be attached to prototypical and unmarked cases of passives, and at the same time, peripheral and marked passives should not be neglected. Only by doing so can we understand the passive system in English comprehensively.