Earticle

Our study is to investigate whether or not the Korean EFL learners rely more on adverbs than verb inflections in collateralness to the previous studies when they process English sentences with verbs and adverbs. As we checked their responses on an ERP experiment, we found some significant results that N400 appeared at the verb position either preceding the adverbs or following when both incongruent and congruent constructions are compared and P600 slightly at the verb position when the verb-adverb constructions are congruent and incongruent. It revealed that even though the Korean EFL learners seem to rely on the lexical meaning in determining the verb inflections, they try to process them syntactically and are affected by L1 of Korean. Along with a result of this aspect, we claim that there should be some universal operating properties in processing adverbs and verb inflections in languages.

This paper investigates the relation between Korean nominal markers (case, topic, focus stress, etc.) and the semantic interpretations each of them induces in multiple nominative constructions (MNC). Adopting Jeon’s (2019b) proposal, which is the revised version of Diesing’s (1992) mapping hypothesis, and Ha’s (2014) applicative approach, I show that in MNCs a generic reading is licensed in the restrictive clause (TopP/FocP) by binding by the null generic operator GEN and an existential/episodic reading can be derived by existential closure in ApplP, which is the nuclear scope. It will be shown that nominative-marked NPs in MNCs are all licensed by an applicative head and are represented in the vP-type projection, ApplP. This mapping structure is supported by the analysis in Jeon (2019b), which presents the evidence against the lexical division of stage- and individual- level predicates, arguing for a distinction dependent on syntactic contexts.

The present study explores the lexical bundles in the spoken discourse of native and Korean learners of English to examine how they are similar and different in structural and functional distribution. The results show that only a few lexical bundles are in common between the two groups, and the frequency distribution of the common bundles is significantly different. Moreover, it is found that there are three major characteristics in the use of lexical bundles in the Korean learners’ spoken discourse. First of all, the Korean learners tend to overuse certain bundles such as I think it is, I agree with the, and bundles with particular connectors such as and, and so. Second, they rely heavily on a small set of lexical bundles which indicates that they possess limited repertoire of lexical bundles. Lastly, the Korean learners’ lexical bundles are more formal than those in the native speakers’ spoken discourse. It is attributed to exposure of formal expressions through textbooks rather than colloquial expressions. The results of the present study also support the idea that the lexical bundles should be underlined in the second and foreign language education.

Jejueo, spoken on Jeju Island, Korea, has long been thought to be a dialect of Korean. However, a recent experiment (Yang et al., 2019) reported that monolingual Korean speakers from the mainland of Korea had comprehension rates of less than 10% on average. The current paper investigates linguistic factors that may influence the low intelligibility of Jejueo to Standard Korean. Linguistic factors reveal that both the number of non-cognates (lexical distance) and pronunciation differences (phonetic distance) affect the low intelligibility rate of Jejueo to some extent. However, lexical distance is more correlated with its intelligibility than phonetic distance. My results also show a larger lexical distance (42.2%) between Jejueo and Standard Korean than between certain pairs of European languages (0% - 16.8%, Gooskens, 2007, pp. 453-459). These findings contribute to our understanding of why Jejueo is unintelligible to people who speak only Korean and supports the importance of developing revitalization programs in Jejueo for young learners whose parents no longer speak to them in the language.

This study investigates the acquisition of preposition stranding in the syntactic contexts, such as elliptical wh-questions and non-elliptical ones, by Korean speakers learning English. An acceptability judgment task was conducted to examine the effects of clause types (non-elliptical vs. elliptical), preposition placement (preposition stranding vs. preposition pied-piping), and the V-P dependency (Dependent vs. Independent vs. Irrelevant). The results showed that preposition stranding was rejected in elliptical wh-questions while preposition fronting was favored over preposition stranding in non-elliptical wh-questions. Though the results were seemingly contradictory to the saliency hypothesis proposed by Bardovi-Harlig (1987), the study will provide an Optimality-theoretic analysis for the learners’ interlanguage grammars by adopting the constraint ranking proposed by Choi (2008).

This study aims to decipher linguistic landscape from a relevance-theoretic perspective in the hope of further broadening the exploration of linguistic landscape research. Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995) is incorporated to answer three questions: (1) Why do viewers focus on linguistic landscape? (2) What is the cognitive mechanism when viewers noticing linguistic landscape? (3) How do viewers identify the intended meanings of linguistic landscape? The analysis uncovers that attention paid to linguistic landscape is on the grounds that it is an input relevant to the mentally represented assumptions of the addressers and exerts a “positive cognitive effect” (Sperber & Wilson 1995, §3.1–2) in a context which may strengthen, revise or yield implications of an existing assumption on one hand. On the other hand, in light of optimal relevance, the relevance-guided comprehension heuristic can be utilized by the viewers as a sound approach to identify the communicator's meaning of linguistic landscape.

The aim of this research is to clarify the diachronic language management of language repertoire of Korean immigrants in Australia. Specifically, this study investigated immigration background, acquisition of language used in the new country, and a person’s self-evaluation of current language usage. In addition, the influence that the diachronic management of immigrants had on social network participation in migrant communities, as identified in the self-evaluation, was analyzed and discussed. In particular, the analysis was conducted with a focus on the relationship between the presence or absence of immigration experience and the self-evaluation of the Korean immigrants of their English ability and development of diachronic management. A comparison between the characteristics of the self-evaluation of the Korean immigrants with the results of Muraoka’s (2017) investigation of Japanese immigrants in Australia was conducted. It has been inferred that by pursuing this further, in the future, it will be possible to propose an analysis model regarding self-evaluation and diachronic management of language usage for the whole immigrant population, including Korean immigrants.