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This research aims to address the controversy over word order patterns of control constructions of the Korean verb seltukhata (‘to persuade’) and settle it with evidence from production and corpus studies (Choi 2007; Hong & Yun 2020). The controversy, in essence, was sparked by the question of whether the constructions Cl-Acc and Acc-Cl of the verb seltukhata are syntactically related by scrambling (Cormack & Smith 2004; Polinsky et al. 2007; Hoe 2013). To answer this question, this study adopts the results of Hong & Yun (2020) concerning the word order preference in control constructions and suggests that the Acc-Cl structure is derived from the Cl-Acc through scrambling.

This paper makes a text mining analysis of the US President Donald Trump and the former President Barack Obama’s remarks on their respective Twitter accounts to examine what words are mainly used by these powerful politicians, and through that what political messages they attempt to convey. The study analyzes Twitter messages from 2017 to 2019 in terms of language patterns and sentiment analysis. The analysis of the language patterns is focused on the use of parts of speech, the use of capital letters, and exclamation points. The results show that Trump uses pronouns most and verbs and nouns are followed, while Obama uses nouns most and pronouns and verbs are next. Trump uses capital letters much more than Obama and the most frequently used word is GREAT while Obama hardly uses capital letters. In the case of Trump, he uses exclamation points with the word, you most while the word everybody is the case for Obama. As there is no nonverbal language elements such as intonation in text messages, Trump tends to use many capital letters and exclamation points to express his feelings as nonverbal elements of language. Through sentiment analysis it was found that both politicians use more positive words than negative words. However, Trump uses more negative words than Obama. As the messages on Twitter have become a primary means for political communication, the two politicians tend to use more positive words to create the positive images.

The purpose of this research is twofold: firstly, it is to clarify the syntactic and semantic status of the copula be; secondly, it is to see how much light the copula be and argue that the copula be is light enough to be a null copula at the position of a light verb v of vP without a specifier. I argue that the copula be is an impoverished category and the lightness of copula be is a pure instantiation of a functional head v, in which a little v introduces verbal predicates as well as external arguments. The proposal in this paper is supported by synchronic and diachronic data. The optional existence of the null copula in synchronic grammatical diversities like child acquisition, standard English casual speech, journal headlines, rhetoric, and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is discussed to prove the lightness of copula be. Diachronically, the grammaticalization shows that the null copula can be a by-product of copularization in the unidirectionality of grammaticalization in English.

This study attempts to investigate whether Korean young EFL learners could differently perceive the difference between English tense and lax vowels (/i/-/ɪ/) with the voicing contrast in the postvocalic consonants. Two perception tests (4I-oddity test and Identification test) are conducted with the following research questions. 1) Do Korean young EFL learners show any difference in correctly discriminating tense and lax vowels according to the voicing contrast in postvocalic consonants at the auditory level? 2) Do they differently identify English tense and lax vowels according to voicing contrasts at the phonological level? 3) Do they differently identify English tense and lax vowels according to different manners of articulation (stops vs. fricatives)? For each experimental test, 11 Korean speakers and 5 native speakers (as a control group) participate in the study. The main findings from the tests are as follows. First, Korean learners perform as well in the 4I-oddity discrimination test as native speakers do, while more poorly performing in the identification test. Second, Korean learners did not use vowel length as an acoustic cue to differentiate between English tense and lax vowels in both perception tests regardless of voicing contrasts or manner of articulation in postvocalic consonants. According to these findings, the study concludes that the absent feature of vowel length in the L1 does not facilitate Korean speakers’ accurate perception of English tense and lax vowels at the phonological level.

Based on the reports of 60 Chinese extraordinary disastrous events by mass media, the present paper investigates the use of contrastive discourse marker “at first I thought” by the survivors of the sudden disastrous events describing with conversation analysis. The research questions are as follows (1) what are people’s reactions to extraordinary disastrous events? (2) How do people describe their first reaction to a disaster in words? (3) What is the relationship between their first reaction and subsequent facts? The finding of current study is when disastrous event witnesses or survivors describe the sudden events, they hold the sense of nothing serious happened in their mentality, and adopt “At first I thought A, then I realized B” and its different variants to describe their first reactions. According to the data, the relationship between their first reaction and subsequent facts is as below: the collision between wrong first thought and correct reality; by using the immediacy markers, or credentials, one begins to identify the correctness of first thought; and naked reports of a catastrophic first thought can be used to describe the extraordinary disastrous events.

Frank expression is a common way of expression. This paper defines frank expression as a speech act, and studies its function from the perspective of interaction. According to the analysis of corpus, Chinese frank expression can be used for positive expression, negative expression and zero degree expression. In positive expression, frank expression is used to enhance sincerity. In the negative expression, confession is used to reduce the degree of face threat or prompt threat. In the zero degree expression, the frank expression is used to enhance credibility. In addition, the function of frank expression is intersecting.

This paper takes Chinese learners from the Chinese department of a Korean university as the object of study and probes into the classroom group interaction mode of Korean Chinese learners. During the 4-month observation period, a total of 5 videos were recorded and 61 groups of interactive data were obtained. After the data transcribed, we divided the interaction modes into two dimensions of equality and interactivity, and the results concluded five types of interaction modes: team, expert/novice, dominant/passive, rotating, and team/marginal. The article also discusses the characteristics of the member constitution of different interaction modes.