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Kang, Sang-Gu. 2012. Stages in the Attrition of English Passives. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 783-805. A longitudinal study of two Korean sisters who returned to Korea after living in the U.S. for two years shows how English attrition can affect their use of passive construction. A comprehension task and a production task were used to collect data from these children for more than three years. The results show that when attrition strikes, production is likely to be affected before comprehension because their ability to understand English passives did not show signs of attrition while production was affected, which supports the regression hypothesis that suggests the path of attrition is the mirror image of the path of acquisition. Then, close examination of the younger sister's results demonstrated that attrition in production can go through some stages. The earliest signs of attrition in passives are producing various errors that did not occur when she was proficient. After that stage, she started avoiding passives, substituting her answers with actives. (Korea University)

Kim, Young-Wha. 2012. Predicate Displacement and the Derivation of Relative Clauses. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 807-824. This paper focuses on the empirical hypothesis that a morphological Merge (affixation) triggers Internal Merge (movement) of a relevant constituent, and vice versa. For instance, relative clauses can be resulted from leftward movement of IP (Predicate Displacement) and a morphological derivation/insertion of relative pronoun (in English) or particle '-(nu)n' (in Korean), followed by the leftward extraction of head noun. This paper discusses the derivational procedure of relative clauses of English and Korean, in line with the idea of leftward movement of Kayne (1994). Language typological factors of N-final and N-first, and the distinction of DP or NP languages are also discussed in explaining the derivation of relative clauses. In this paper, we claim that null D0 or null C0 hypothesis applies to Korean, but only to superficial representations. In the base, the underlying configuration of DP or CP may induce External Merge of D0 or C0 in a form of [+definite] 'ku/ce/i' (that/this) or 'kes' (that) in Korean. Speaker's intention takes the optionality. (Hallym University)

Park, Myung-Kwan. 2012. Structurally Ambiguous Empty Nominal Pro-forms in Korean. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 825-843. In this paper we argue that the empty category element in the argument position of Korean substitutes either for DP or NP. We present two pieces of evidence in favor of this thesis. One is that in the apparently DP structure, it can replace not only the whole DP but also its sub-constituent NP. Another is that unlike an ordinary pronoun, it can replace an indefinite expression. We show that this indefinite expression in Korean does not constitute DP but NP, which in turn supports the idea that the empty category element replaces an NP indefinite expression. We then argue that the empty category element is pro. Evidence for this comes from both extraction out of ellipsis and the contrast in elision between nominal NP's/DP's and adverbials. To the extent this analysis is right, the difference between English and Korean in light of the availability of pro is attributed to the fact that only the latter language has a covert pro-form in its lexicon. (Dongguk University)

Park, Bum-Sik & Bae, Suyoung. 2012. Null Arguments: Sometimes pro, Sometimes Ellipsis. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 845-866. The paper investigates the identification of the null argument in Korean. Two major approaches are proposed in the literature: ellipsis approach (Kim 1999, Saito 2007,) and pro approach (Hoji 1998, Ahn and Cho 2010, 2012a,b). Bringing a novel set of data, this paper proposes a hybrid approach: both approaches are needed to accomodate the relevant data. Given that pro in general provides wider range of interpretations than ellipsis does, it is not an easy task to show that ellipsis is also available for the null argument. However, this paper argues that certain null argument constructions can be best accounted for by the ellipsis approach, which leads to the conclusion that both approaches should be adopted. (Dongguk University)

Bae, Hee Sook. 2012. Selection of Basic Concepts Based on Conceptual Understanding Test on First Words of Young Children 3 to 4. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 867-884. Language is a system of signs composed of signifier and signified. It is the meaning(signified) that the speaker wants to transmit to interlocutor. The language development in early age is a process to find symbols(signifier) based on the basic-concept which is previously formed (Bloom, 1995; Mandler, 2004). Such a system of basic-concept and early vocabulary is a fundamental of cognitive development and language development because the conceptual system is a starting point of specialization and systematization of concept which is necessary for acquiring the knowledge from the environment. Nowaday, a number of studies focus on the issue of basic concepts in various fields related to language development(Brenza et al., 1981, Kong & Anthony, 2011). However, since there exists no adequate list, most studies are based on Boehm’s list(2011). Thus, this research proposes 168 basic concepts that we obtain from two stages; we firstly select the list of basic concept candidates by matching early vocabulary and pre-existing conceptual system for all ages, and secondly test understanding level of children aged 3 to 4 in Seoul and Jeonju. Not only, the research result suggests the system of concept in normal early age children, but it also can be a criterion for finding damaged area in children with language developmental disability (Good Gang-an Hospital).

An, Young-ran. 2012. The Role of Lexical Frequency: A Case of Consonant Insertion in Reduplication. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 885-905. Frequency has attracted attention in phonology with regard to whether it exerts influence on phonology and if so, how significantly it affects phonological processes. The reduplication in Korean in which a consonant is epenthesized in the reduplicant poses an interesting question of what consonant is inserted in what way. One of the probable factors is lexical frequency: whether the choice of consonants comes from the existing patterns in lexicon. The overall finding suggests that in general the speakers’ behavior in the experiment does not simply reflect the lexical statistics. Meanwhile, some correlations were found between the experiment responses and the corpus data, e.g. between the frequency of inserted consonants and that of word-initial consonants. (Korea Christian University)

Oh, Eunjeong & Kim, Saeromi. 2012. On Korean Children's Knowledge of Principle B. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 907-928. Late emergence of Principle B relative to Principle A is widely observed in the L1 acquisition of Binding Principles. Chien and Wexler (1990) argued that the delayed acquisition of Principle B is attributed to the lack of pragmatic principles (called Principle P), not to the lack of Principle B. They took as evidence for their claim children's better performance on binding interpretation of pronouns with a quantified antecedent than their performance on binding interpretation of pronouns with a referential antecedent. Following Chien and Wexler's work, numerous studies replicated their experiments but the results of the studies were quite divergent. The present study attempts to readdress the issue of Principle B in child grammar by testing 49 Korean children's performance (between the ages of 5 to 7) on the referential and quantificational binding interpretation for pronouns. We found the opposite pattern: children's performance on referential reading for pronouns was more accurate than their performance on quantificational reading for pronouns. We consider Sorace and Serratrice (2009)'s Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis as possible explanation of the results. (Sangmyung University & New York University

Lee, Minkyung. 2012. (Non)-Adjacent Vowel Harmony in Korean: Pro-Serial OT Account. The Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 929-947. Without resorting to long-distance Alignment and local Agree that parallel OT adopts to deal with vowel harmony(VH) as assimilation through autosegmental spreading, this paper claims that (non)-adjacent VH in Korean ideophonic words can be achieved in a gradual mode under Harmonic Serialism(HS). In general, Korean vowels show a dark [+ATR] vs. light [-ATR] alternation. All vowels, no matter where they occur, are targeted to VH. However, non-initial high front vowels are always transparent to VH while non-initial high back vowels vary in their behavior, i.e., transparent to VH sometimes and optional in VH some other times. In serial OT, prior to harmonic feature propagation, Licence compels a floating feature-size morpheme to dock onto the prominent word-intial syllable and Share forces to spread the harmonizing feature rightward. VH processes of linking and spreading necessitate a separate path through Gen and Eval under gradualness, a unique asset of HS. In essence, (non)-adjacent Korean ideophonic VH is well couched into the HS's major spirit of gradually improved harmony. (Daegu University)

Lee, Won Pyo. 2012. A Linguistic Analysis of "Products Information Reportage": From the Perspectives of Genre Analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 949-993. This paper seeks to explore the linguistic and discoursal realizations as well as the hybrid nature of "products information reportage", a relatively new genre in Korean newspapers, within the framework of "genre analysis" (Swales 1990; Bhatia 2005; Halmari & Virtanen 2005) and "critical discourse analysis" (Fairclough 1992). On the macro-level, the present analysis examines the 'layout', 'headlines', and 'discourse and move-structure' of the new genre, and shows that despite some apparent similarities between the new genre and 'news reportage󰡑in non-linguistic elements such as photos, and general structure of story proper, there are also noticeable differences in titles, subtitles and the function of the first paragraphs of the articles between the two genres. The move-structure is suggested to be composed of seven main discourse categories, including 'providing background', 'introducing a particular product', 'providing detailed information on the product', and 'emphasizing the merits/excellence of the products'. On the micro-level, this paper analyzes rhetorical structure and linguistic/rhetorical features of the new genre. In terms of rhetorical structure theory (Mann & Thompson 1988), pragmatic relations such as 'background', 'antithesis', and 'evidence', through which "speakers or writers apparently have the intention of bringing about a change in opinion, position or behavior of readers or listeners" (Renkema 2004: 110), are found between the clauses/sentences in the genre. In addition, the genre turns out to have some linguistic/rhetorical characteristics as well, which manifest clearly in the uses of direct quotations, questions/self-responses, and textual and interactional metadiscourse markers, metaphor, etc. Based on comparison between the results of this paper and the findings of Bell (1991) and Bhatia (2005) on news reportage and advertisements respectively, and the "intertextuality" between the 'products information reportage' and the real advertisements in the same newspapers, this paper suggests that 'products information reportage' has a hybrid nature, revealing more similarities with 'advertisements' rather than 'news reportage'. This article concludes with some discussion on the hybrid nature of the genre, drawing on some theoretical concepts including "intergenre", "genre-chains", "discourse and social change". (Yonsei University)

Chung, Kyung-Sook. 2012. The Semantics of the Korean Sentence-Final Suffix -ney: in Relation to Evidentiality and Mirativity. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 995-1016. The Korean sentence-final suffix–ney has been analyzed as an epistemic modal, an evidential, or a mirative. This paper claims that -ney is not an epistemic modal nor an evidential although it closely relates to evidentiality in that it indicates that the speaker serves as the acquirer of the evidence for a given proposition at the utterance time. Instead it is argued that -ney should be analyzed as a mirative because it indicates that the expressed proposition is new or unexpected and thus unassimilated to the speaker’s existing knowledge. Furthermore, it is argued that this mirative meaning is not sufficient to account for -ney because it requires that the speaker should be involved in the proposition objectively. The paper concludes that -ney has three meaning components:(i) evidence acquisition, (ii) new and unassimilated information, and (iii) objectification of the speaker. (Pusan National University)

Chung, Taegoo. 2012. A UG Approach to the Development of L2 English Articles, Korean Journal of Linguistics. 37-4, 1017-1042. This study examines the development of L2 English articles by Korean EFL students (middle school, high school and college students) in terms of the specificity feature. It shows that the acquisition order or difficulty level of L2 English articles is [-specific] a > [+specific] a > the > [+specific] Φ > [-specific] Φ (from the earliest/easiest to the latest/most difficult), which has not been presented in the literature. This finding implies that the prototypical meaning of a DP with the indefinite article a is a non-specific entity, and a DP with the zero Φ article typically refers to the most definite one (Berezowski 2009, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freemman 1999). The significant role of the UG feature specificity with the Korean teenage speakers of L2 English is consistent with the findings of Ionin et al. (2004). But the findings reveal that the number of a certain type of learners who are sensitive to specificity and thus overuse the does not decrease as their proficiency increases, suggesting that some special instructions or treatments be needed for this type of Korean EFL learners. (Korea University)

Chae, Hee-Rahk. 2012. Are There Relative Clauses in Korean?: A Participle Clause Analysis. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 1043-1065. There have been many different approaches to the analysis of Korean adnominal clauses, most of which are under the assumption that they are relative clauses. However, they have properties which cannot be attributed to relative constructions. Firstly, the gaps in them are different from those in relative clauses: they have the properties of null anaphors. Secondly, the adnominal clauses do not require gaps: there are some sub-types of adnominal clauses which do not contain any gap associated with the head noun syntactically. Based on these observations, we propose that Korean adnominal clauses should be analysed as a clausal unit participle construction. This approach is a development of those in Matsumoto (1988, 1997) and Comrie (1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2003), on the one hand, and those in Na and Huck (1993), Yoon (2011) and Yeon (2012), on the other. These approaches are emphasizing the role of semantics and/or pragmatics in analyzing adnominal clauses in such languages as Japanese and Korean. Major contributions of this study can be summarized as follows. Firstly, we have provided a unified analysis of Korean adnominal clauses, which deals with “non-regular” adnominal clauses as well. Secondly, we have established a theoretical basis on capturing similarities and differences systematically between relative clauses and participle clauses in analyzing other languages. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

Hong, Yong-Tcheol. 2012. Relative Clause Markers in Korean. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 1067-1094. "-nun" and "-un", two of the relative clause markers used in Korean, exhibit some interesting peculiarities yet to be investigated. They cannot combine with the past tense marker "-ess". This is why many researchers consider that they are relative clause markers which express tense; "-nun" is a relative clause marker expressing [-Past] tense, and "-un" is a relative clause marker expressing [-Past] tense or [+Past] tense according to the semantic type of the predicate with which it combines: "-un" expresses [+Past] tense when it combines with an event predicate while it expresses [-Past] tense when it combines with a state predicate. However, the view that they are relative clause markers which express tense cannot account for the fact that the morpheme "-un" can express not only [-Past] tense but also [+Past] tense. This paper proposes a new approach which presupposes the existence of a unique pure relative clause marker in Korean. We argue that this is "-un", and that tense interpretation in relative clauses containing "-nun" or "-un" is due to the [-Past] zero morpheme or the elided [+Past] morpheme "-ess". More concretely, "-nun" is considered through analysis to be a complex composed of the [-Past] zero morpheme + the progressive morpheme "-nun" + the pure relative clause marker "-un", where "-nun" and "-un" are contracted to "-nun". "-un" when combined with state predicates is considered through analysis to be a complex composed of the [-Past] zero morpheme + the pure relative clause marker "-un". As for "-un" when combined with event predicates, it is considered through analysis to be a complex composed of the elided [+Past] morpheme "-ess" + the pure relative clause marker "-un". Note that one of the important assumptions in this paper is that the [+Past] morpheme "-ess" is elided before the pure relative clause marker "-un" for a morpho-phonological reason. Given this assumption, the question arises as to why the "-ess" ellipsis does not occur when "-ess" comes before the "-un" which combines with a state predicate. If the "-ess" ellipsis did occur, this would allow for a [+Past] interpretation, contrary to fact. To resolve this problem, we propose an ambiguity elimination strategy: when a form allows for more than two interpretations, only one should be taken and the others are eliminated. The situation where "-un" combines with state predicates should be applicable to this ambiguity elimination strategy since the same form of "-un" can be derived from the complex [[-Past] zero morpheme + "-un"], which would produce a [-Past] tense interpretation, or from the complex [elided "-ess" + "-un"], which would produce a [+Past] tense interpretation. Which one should be settled upon and which should be eliminated? Note that in relative clauses containing a state predicate, "-un" is the only means to express a [-Past] tense interpretation while there are other means for expressing a [+Past] tense, such as "-ten", which is the complex [retrospective morpheme "-te" + pure relative clause marker "-un"]. Therefore, a [-Past] tense interpretation should be taken to the detriment of a [+Past] tense interpretation. That is why, when "-un" combines with a state predicate, there is only a [-Past] tense interpretation. On the other hand, when "-un" combines with an event predicate, for which there is only a [+Past] tense interpretation, a different question arises: why can it not have a [-Past] tense interpretation even though it can be derived from the complex [[-Past] zero morpheme + "-un"]? Note that in relative clauses containing event predicates, there is another means for a [-Past] tense interpretation, which is "-nun". This is why, when "-un" combines with an event predicate, a [+Past] tense interpretation should be settled upon rather than a [-Past] tense interpretation. (Sungshin Women's University)

Hwang, Injah & Lee, Shinsook. 2012. Perception of English Vowel Categories by Korean University Students. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-4, 1095-1117. The paper examined Korean university students' perception of English vowel categories /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /ʌ/, and /ɔ/ using English minimal pairs designed for the study. Thirty female freshmen recruited from a university in Seoul took part in the discrimination and identification tests. The results showed that most students did not have much difficulty discriminating the vowel contrasts between /ɪ/ & /ɛ/, /ɛ/ & /æ/, and /ʌ/ & /ɔ/. However, they had a great difficulty identifying target vowel categories in the identification test, although students in the high-proficiency group outperformed those in the low-proficiency group. The overall results indicated that the students' perception of English vowel categories was affected by task types, students' L1 vowel categories, and their English proficiency. However, the results of the experiments showed that the students' familiarity with the target words was not correlated with their perceptual accuracy. The findings of the study were further discussed in terms of task effects, vowel category variance, error patterns, EFL learners' phonetic category representation, and L2 speech perception models. (Korea University)