Earticle

This paper argues that Korean EFL learners avoid or underproduce English phrasal verbs due to their ignorance of them. Their ignorance culminates in figurative phrasal verbs in the spirit of Dagut and Laufer (1985), since their meaning is not easily predicted from their individual elements, the verb and the adverb. This is exhibited in the survey among Korean EFL learners, in which figurative phrasal verbs are apparently underproduced. I attribute this to the fact that most EFL learners are ignorant of English phrasal verbs, which are out of their vocabulary range, but not to the structural difference between their L1 and L2. The ignorance of phrasal verbs consequently leads them to use their equivalent one-word verbs. Native speakers, on the other hand, are seen to employ phrasal verbs freely in their casual speech, whether they are literal, completive, or figurative, as exemplified in the survey of this paper. Given that phrasal verbs are used more often in informal and colloquial language and that they are a very important part of everyday English (Hart, 2009), it is indispensible for the Korean EFL learners to master them for their personal communication with native speakers of English. Understanding syntactic and semantic properties of phrasal verbs in contrast with prepositional verbs is an essential part of mastering the so-called verb-plus-particle constructions in English.

It is a well-known fact that more than one attributive adjectives functioning as a noun modifier show relatively fixed sequential order. For example, subjective adjectives like pretty, nice, or delicious appear before descriptive adjectives like size, shape, or colour when two adjectives at the same time modify a noun. In addition, adjectives describing size, shape, and colour show relatively fixed sequential order: size < shape < colour < noun. It has been suggested that the sequential ordering constraint on adjective co-occurrences is based on the iconic principle of proximity. This indicates that some adjectives that are conceptually more strongly related to the noun are also syntactically close to it. More specifically, the subjective (qualifying) adjectives are least close to or most distant from nouns, and descriptive adjectives are close to the semantic nature of nouns. This paper aimed to investigate whether the sequential ordering constraint found in English could also be found in other languages like Korean. In this study, Korean adults and children aged 5-6 were tested by the picture-production task. The results from the present study demonstrate that even though there are some variations in the sequential ordering among descriptive adjectives, Korean children and adults show the sequential ordering constraint on adjective co-occurrences found in many languages.

This paper aims to examine Toni Morrison’s consistent struggle of remaining whole in this incomplete world in which human beings’ freedom has been restricted. Her job for the truth is to recover the past and re-envision the future by exorcising the trauma, both personal and historic. She makes the African American history including traditional black music and their experiences condensed to the individual and manifested his or her self image in her novels especially through women who suffered from triple discrimination in terms of race, sex, and class. Jazz deals with the transformation of tragic relationship of a love triangle. Morrison explores African Americans’ sorrows, secrets and violent past, tracing their inside cracks caused by the cutoff from ancestors and family. Morrison uses the improvisational quality of jazz music as a narrative strategy to make Jazz a talking book. As Joe and Violet reconstruct their identity through struggling married life, Morrison shows healing process to those who survive the violent confrontation with the repressed past. In conclusion, Morrison exorcises black people’s cycle of trauma in generations and each of them comes to realize the power of his own voice in the process of healing, transformation and insight by narrating his life and defining himself as a subject. Morrison discovers and celebrates the dynamic force and firm determination that have enabled generations of African American to survive.

This paper is designed to examine how women take a stance against patriarchal society and were branded as subjects of aversion that poses a threat to the society. And this process of forsakenness as disgusted images is explored through Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abject’. According to Kristeva, an abject object poses a threat to the existence of a subject and it is to be detested and denied. I intend to analyze a work by a feminist playwright, Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart through the concept of ‘abject’. The three sisters in the play are described as abject in society. The oldest, Lenny has a shrunken ovary and she deviates from the boundaries of ‘normal’ women who can bear children. The middle one, Meg was banished from a small town in the South because she refuses to be an idealization of a meek and elegant Southern lady. The youngest, Babe cannot stand the physical and psychological abuse from her husband and shoots him, making her an abject character who directly challenges the patriarchal order. The three sisters also consider themselves as abject and opt for a life of isolation and exclusion. However, fluid characteristics of abject that hover between the boundaries help the sisters to acknowledge themselves as changeable subjects. Even though, it is evident that abject independence as a disparate other poses a threat to subjects who are fixed in their ways in the standardized society, abject can be defined as an object placed between ambiguous boundaries that we have no choice but to embrace in the end for being most true to the subject.

The purpose of this study is to analyze Paula Vogel’s recent play, How I Learned To Drive, through the aspect that dramaturgy has taken to postmodernism. She attempts to challenge normative values of our society through allusive and metaphoric stages which reflect her political propaganda. She uses her own unique dramaturgy like structure, form, style and characters in order to blur established boundaries of all our rigid concepts in the society. In How I Learned To Drive, Vogel demonstrates moral ambivalence through her postmodern dramatic strategies. How I Learned To Drive ostensibly deals with child abuse and pedophilia. However, it does not cause indignation to the audience and readers. In order to destabilize the confined boundaries of judgment for the relationship between Peck and Li’l Bit, Vogel heightens the dramatic effect with innovative techniques such as comic chorus and special audio and visual devices. Vogel does not suggest any right and concrete answer. In How I Learned To Drive, she combines various kinds of dramaturgy with her experimental subject and new styles for deconstructing our conventions and prejudice. Vogel appears to deliver her political propaganda through these postmodern dramaturgy and suggests the possibility of a more flexible way of thinking for readers and spectators.

William Carlos Williams’ concept of the “contact” is pivotal in understanding his work and poetical theories. What Williams means by contact functions as an important question putting into consideration the distinct historical and cultural identity of the period. For Symbolist poets the things of this world become symbols through which they strive to express abstract ideas above words. But for Williams Symbolist poetic tropes such as simile and metaphor stick to the associational or sentimental value and only blur the uniqueness and the individuality of things. He objects to the way that the trope of similarity deprives language of particularity and presence. Instead, Williams emphasizes the Precisionist and Objectivist language that does not describe or classify the meanings of words. Williams proposes that if there is to be artist’s own presence in his poetry, it must be impersonal and objective. And he compels his readers to focus on the vivid gestalt of “things” he presents in his poems. Williams’ poetical theory is not simply distinguishable from that of Symbolist poetry; but his Precisionist Objectivism serves as a stepping stone to his vision of both American identity and modernist culture. His awareness of American locality leads to his discovery that the American voice must be the foundation of American verse. For him a true American voice reflects “presence” and “particularity” that characterize the immediate cultural and historical ground on which the American stands. Williams’ poetry becomes a microcosm of his culture and society in which he captures and names an identifiable relation with the moment and place where he exists. Preferring to let the actual words that he finds in his immediate environment speak for themselves, Williams only shows by silently pointing in order to present the topography of his time. In Williams’ poetry every object has not simply its own locality but names the unique and particular historical context in which it is situated.

William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has been known as a romantic comedy. But It is not proper to include this play in the category of comedy because we can find many tragic elements in it: Shylock loses the most precious thing in his life, Christians show exclusive and selfish mercy. These factors can be considered incompatible with a genre of a romantic comedy. Also The Merchant of Venice treats themes and subject matters which reflect social problems such as religious conflicts and racial discrimination between Christianity and Judaism as well as the Europeans’ concept about usury. Shakespeare describes these problems on the basis of historic facts and anti-Semitic sentiments of the public. At the same time, he intends to tolerate all social problems through mutual understanding, and makes us have wisdom and vision for desirable society by presenting an assignment we all have to solve. Therefore, this paper focuses on examining a Shylock as an outsider and a problematic character in terms of historical and racial background. Shylock’s ambivalent status as a comic and tragic figure reflects the problematics of the early modern Europeans’ ideas of mercy, usury and anti-Semitism. Into Shylock are projected all the negative aspects of the early period of the primitive accumulation of capital. And Shylock is made a victim of racism and nationalism in a Christian, mercantile society. The Merchant of Venice is a dark problem comedy, not a happy comedy.

The purpose of this paper was to examine how Korean learners of English express temporal information and use the tense-aspect to report chains of events in their narrative discourse. Ten adults Korean learners of English participated (two intermediate-level and eight advanced-level learners). The participants were asked to produce a Korean-telling-story task first and then a English-telling-story task. Twenty oral narratives were collected and grounding analysis was performed on all narrative texts. The findings of the study revealed that Korean learners tended to use the past tense to express completed actions in the foreground and the non-past to comment on actions or to evaluate the events in the background. This supports that grounding of narrative discourse may influence the distribution of tense-aspect morphology. Further studies should observe the function of the background and its influence on tense-aspect in narratives with a large-scale data.

A number of John Donne’s prose and divine poems clearly enumerate his unswerving preoccupation with human mortality and the spiritual domain after death. Donne, installed Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621, foregrounds such thematic concerns on the basis of his religious perspectives and attitudes. The Progress of the Soul—a commemorative verse for the death of Elizabeth Drury and written along with Holy Sonnets features his key subjects of man’s death and immortal soul after his bodily extinction. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how this poem embodies the transmigration of the soul after human mortality. The article investigates how the speaker unfolds his reflections on mortality, the human world, and the soul’s entering the imperishable realm beyond death. In dealing with this matter, the paper incorporates the author’s prose and other religious pieces of works which enrich his thematic ideas on the profound voyage of the soul into the spiritual haven after the physical demise of human beings.

Modal expressions such as CAN and V-(u)l-swu iss ‘can’ are ambiguously interpreted. That is, The English modal can is ambiguous between a root modal (i.e., RM) reading denoting an ability/capability reading and an epistemic modal (i.e., EM) reading denoting a possibility/probability reading. In the same vein, The modal external negation disambiguates the modal reading: only the RM reading survives, while the EM reading is suppressed. The embedded focus bearing element in the EM reading cannot bear a presupposed interpretation in spec-C, since the plain topic cannot be compatible with the embedded spec-C. Thus, the focus bearing element between an interrogative C and wh-in-situ in the EM reading always induces the intervention effect. More importantly, when the nun-marked subject occurs in the modal V-(u)l-swu iss ‘can’ context, only the RM reading survives. That is, the plain topic plays an important role that disambiguates the modal reading. This leads us to believe that the real reason why the modal external negation context induces the sentence to only bear the RM reading is because the subject in such a context plays a topic. It logically follows that the subject in the modal external negation context such as V-(u)l-swu eps ‘cannot’ should be a topic, which always induces the intervention effect to be cancelled.

The purpose of this study was to examine the correlation between TOEIC score and the amount of English listening strategies used in TOEIC listening test. Data were collected from 75 Korean college students who took TOEIC test in 2011, and a questionnaire was used as the tool for this study. The major findings of this study include: First, high level college students used more memory, cognitive Ⅱ, metacognitive, compensation, and affective strategies than low level college students did in TOEIC listening test. But low level college students used more cognitive Ⅰ strategies than high level students did. Second, the gamma score was very high in memory, cognitive Ⅱ, metacognitive, compensation, and affective strategies, which means that there are high correlations between TOEIC score and the amount of English listening strategies used. But in cognitive Ⅰ, the gamma score was -.845(p<.001), which means there are negative correlations between them. Therefore, I could say that although Cognitive Ⅰ and Ⅱ could be taught from the beginning level in teaching English listening, and Cognitive I such as ‘To listen with translating into Korean’, ‘To try to translate into Korean what they heard’, and ‘To try to mimic words that they heard’ could be more useful in the beginning level. Later, cognitive Ⅱ should be emphasized more than cognitive Ⅰ. But teachers must consider students’ cognitive ability when they teach how to use metacognitve strategies.

The purpose of the study is to investigate relationships between attitudes and theory of mind. Theory of mind means theoretical area to understand mental states, such as feelings or desires of people for predicting their behaviors. When we understand theory of mind of language learners, we can predict and explain their language learning actions and achievements. Similarly, attitudes indicate individuals’ beliefs and emontion to all attitudinal people and objects. Based on the attitudes toward the objects, we evaluate them positively or negatively. A person predicts and evaluates objects or human behaviors through theory of mind, so that he or she produces positive or negative attitudes toward them. Attitudes that represent mental states toward all attitude persons, groups, objects, etc, form and change through various processes: the tripartite model, implicit and explicit processes, and social interaction. Therefore, theory of mind can strongly influence all of these processes for attitude formation and change. Also, the relationship between attitude and theory of mind can be applied to the fields of language learning, and motivations have close connections with attitudes.

The purpose of this study is to analyze and review writing activities in high school textbooks according to the Standard of Achievement defined in the revised 7th curriculum. First, it categorizes the activities from selected textbooks, English Ⅰ(Grade 11) and Ⅱ(grade 12), under the three divisions of Raimes’ controlled-to-free approach and under the four writing tasks by Scott. Then it analyzes each activity, focusing on what ways it fulfills the relevant Standard of Achievement. All the goals of Standards of Achievement largely follow, hence can be categorized into, one of the suggested writing approach and tasks. After the analysis, it was found that there was a substantial unbalance among the number of activities intended for the controlled-to-free approach. The textbooks provide a large number of activities for guided writing, which contributes to developing written coherence and organization less effectively than free writing. Free writing, though possibly tough and confusing at first, is an inevitable practice for paragraph composition. Students are expected to learn ways to select words and build logic throughout repetitive tasks of various topics. As the ultimate goal of writing education is to enable students to write with autonomy and coherence, it is desirable to provide more free writing activities than being provided today.

This paper deals with two questions related to Korean resultatives. One is about the constructional meaning of Korean resultatives. English resultatives are known to have a constructional meaning of ‘X CAUSE [Y BECOME Z]’, which is correspond to the constructional subevent of Goldberg & Jackendoff(2004)’s analysis of resultatives. Compared to this, I suggest a generalized form of ‘X AFFECT Y To CAUSE [Y' BECOME Z]’ in addition to the constructional meaning of English resultatives mentioned above as constructional meanings of Korean resultatives. It is derived from the Korean resultatives which have an independent embedded clause in the resultatives. The other issue discussed in this paper is concerned with the Goldberg(1997)’s Causal Relation Hypothesis. I suggest a revised causal relation hypothesis using features which represents a combination of conceptual function and contextual function. The conceptional function reflects the speaker’s experience of the world, and the contextual function indicates a relationship between the verbal subevent and the constructional subevent in the sense of Goldberg & Jackendoff(2004)’s analysis of resultatives. With this feature based constraint, I show that a pragmatic explanation is possible on the Korean unergative resultatives.