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This study explores Korean plural marking on nouns with animacy distinctions by Chinese L2 Korean learners. Korean nouns are classified according to ± animacy and animacy hierarchy, and animate nouns are more likely to be marked by ‘-tul’ than inanimate ones to represent a plural meaning. Considering that Chinese plural marking involving ‘们’ has more restrictions in realization than Korean, this study investigated whether Chinese learners with low and high Korean proficiency levels as well as Korean adults speakers as a control group exhibit different plural marking on animate nouns referring to a person or an animal; and inanimate ones referring to a thing or abstract notion. In an elicitation task where participants were instructed to fill in the blank with a noun that matches plural contents of the picture presented, they were allowed to produce either a marked or an unmarked noun to encode plurality. The results showed that the low proficiency group tended to use an unmarked noun regardless of noun animacy, while the high proficiency group, like the control group, attached ‘-tul’ to animate nouns more than inanimate ones. These results are discussed in conjunction with L1 transfer.

This study aims to investigate pre-service English teachers’ perceptions and satisfaction on major courses using flipped learning, a type of online and offline blended learning. Fifty-four college students who were taking English education courses participated in the research. The data were collected through survey questionnaires. Statistical analyses including correlation and regression analysis were utilized for data analysis. The participants’ perceptions and satisfaction were analyzed according to the five categories: (1) attention, (2) relevance, (3) interaction, (4) convenience, and (5) satisfaction. These domains were analyzed and compared in terms of the students’ gender, school year, academic achievement, and prior experience of flipped classes. Among the categories, ‘attention’ is the most influential factor on the satisfaction of the flipped learning. Compared with face-to-face or non-face-to-face classes, the students’ overall satisfaction and the preference for the flipped learning class were significantly high. Possible reasons were discussed along with the pre-service English teachers’ open comments. Based on the major findings, pedagogical suggestions for the effective implementation of flipped learning were provided.

This paper explores the semantic asymmetry in the antonymous pairs of Korean spatial terms in terms of the unmarkedness notion. The semantic asymmetries in the antonymous pairs of positional spatial terms are discussed in terms of the degree in meaning extensions of the individual terms according to the unmarkedness of the terms. The following claims are made in this paper. First, the semantic asymmetry in terms of the degree of meaning extension differs according to the horizontal and vertical dimension of the spatial terms. The spatial term ‘wi(top)’ in the vertical dimension shows the wider range of meaning extension than the antonymous spatial terms ‘arae(bottom)’ in the meaning. The asymmetric tendency of the antonymous pair in the vertical dimension is also preserved in the semantic combination of compound nouns. The same asymmetry from the unmarkedness effect is not true of the spatial terms in the horizontal dimension in that the spatial term ‘ap(front)’ in the horizontal dimension shows the similar range of meaning extension to ‘tui(back)’ and does not display the unmarkedness effect from bodily experience and semantic asymmetry. Furthermore the asymmetric tendency from the unmarkedness effect in the horizontal dimension is not shown in the semantic combination of compound nouns, either. Second, the positive rather than negative value terms in space-related dimensional adjectives indicate the unmarked properties in terms of the cognitive saliency and serve as the typical source of stems for their nouns for property marking. The unmarkedness of positive value terms in cognitive saliency is argued to lead to the more power of meaning extension. The antonymous dimensional adjectives in the pairs are claimed to show the different ranges of uses and meaning extensions due to the unmarkedness effect.

This study analyzed the cross-cultural pragmatic similarities and differences of refusal speech acts between 75 Korean and 74 Dutch speakers aged 40–50. A survey including 8 different refusal situations was designed in Korean and Dutch languages and distributed to each group respectively. The respondents were asked how they would speak in the given situations of refusal. The results revealed significant differences in the overall frequencies of direct, indirect, no refusals and adjunct expressions, with the Dutch speakers producing more in direct refusals and adjuncts, the Korean speakers producing more in indirect refusals and no refusals. While the pattern of indirect refusal strategies was more similar than different, the Korean speakers used more 'regret' strategies and the Dutch speakers used more 'acceptance as a refusal' strategies than their counterparts. This study also explored what caused the results and what the results could tell us about their cultural differences, and the contrast of individualism and collectivism was presumed to be one of the most salient cultural dimensions that could help find the answer to the questions.

This study examined and analyzed learners' perception of and satisfaction with real-time Korean language classes conducted online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to determine the possibility of whether real-time online teaching methods will be used widely in the Korean language education field in the future. The results of this study revealed that despite the fact that real-time online instruction has evolved significantly over the recent years, many learners still value the benefits of face-to-face learning. The Korean language learners longed for opportunities to practice communication inside and outside the classroom. It is clear from the opinions of learners that the classroom is not only a place where linguistic knowledge is delivered, but also a place of communication in which language learning is completed as students interact with their teachers and classmates. The results indicate that real-time online classes in language classes where interaction is necessary are only effective as an alternative to endure the COVID-19 era when it comes to improving speaking abilities. However, real-time online class in such areas as listening and reading, which are associated with high satisfaction and not that much different from face-to-face classes, is considered a fine substitute for traditional face-to-face instruction.

Considerable attention is paid to how to derive fragments that nonetheless yields a full-fledged clausal interpretation to achieve an explanation of how elided fragments are realized at syntax. The quest of answering these questions has led to exciting research that explore our understanding of how language works. The primary goal of this paper is to showⅰ) its syntactic properties of Fragmentary Questions(FQs) in Korean, highlighting the theoretical implications for contemporary theories of ellipsis. FQs in Korean are derived by the movement of a contrastive topic marked remnant to the CP, followed by clausal deletion. As well, ⅱ) Fragments in English and FQs in Korean can be explained in a unified way by exploiting Chomsky’s (2013,2015) labeling algorithm. This paper also aims to present the possibility that labels of remnants in FQs in Korean play a crucial role to be fully interpreted at Conceptual-Intentional(CI) Interface.

This study explores the use of tone in the speech of speakers who were born in North Kyungsang and moved to Seoul after the age of 20 and that of speakers who were born in Seoul and moved to North Kyungsang as an adult. Specifically, this study examines whether mobile speakers produce North Kyungsang Korean tones in any of the three contexts: Reading passage, word list, and minimal pair. Moreover, this study investigates whether extralinguistic factors such as gender, length of stay in a new region, and attitude towards the first dialect and second dialect affect the acquisition of the new dialect feature. The results show that the majority of speakers from North Kyungsang show evidence of having acquired the Seoul Korean accent pattern in all of the three tasks, while none of the speakers from Seoul shows evidence of having acquired North Kyungsang Korean tones in any contexts.

Depictive secondary predicates in English are usually realized as AP, PP, or DP, while depictives in Korean are normally realized as AdvP('-key') or PP('-(u)lo'). Therefore, some previous analyses for English depictives such as small clause analysis, flat ternary analysis, adjunction analysis and complex predicate analysis are not adequate enough to accurately account for the syntactic properties of Korean depictives. This paper discusses some similarities and differences in syntactic and semantic properties of depictives between English and Korean, and shows that these similarities and differences can be naturally accounted for under Lee's(2021) hybrid approach, where the Korean subject-oriented depictive is analyzed as a VP-adjunct, such as the manner adverb, while the Korean object-oriented depictive and the following V form a complex predicate, such as serial verb constructions.

This study was to examine how L2 writers from different disciplines construct stance markers such as hedges or boosters in research article abstracts. A total of 180 English research article abstracts were collected from the disciplines of applied linguists, public administration, business, computer science, electronic engineering, and biology. Hedges and boosters were analyzed based on the taxonomy proposed by Hyland(2005) and Hu and Cao(2011). The findings revealed that the disciplines of soft sciences contained more stance markers than hard sciences. The discipline of applied linguistics contained the highest proportion of hedges, whereas the discipline of biology contained the highest proportion of boosters. Considerably fewer hedges and boosters were found in the electronic engineering corpus. The most frequently used type of hedges and boosters was epistemic lexical verbs. The analysis suggests that discipline-specific writing conventions should be considered in L2 academic writing instruction. Studies on variations across disciplines may provide pedagogical implications for L2 academic writing courses.