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This study aims to investigate and deconstruct frontierism as one of American myths by analyzing Paul Auster’s Moon Palace. The paper begins with tracing down how Americans have regarded their land; for example, Crevecoeur, a French settler, thinks of America as the land of freedom though their writings also shows contradictory aspects of frontierism. Leo Marx delineates how early American settlers and writers consider America as a garden with machine in which both metaphors function to bring forth the myth of frontierism. Moon Palace, a rhapsody of chance and fate, delivers Macro’s exploration of his own genealogical origin as well as the truths of American dream and frontierism. Marco, an orphan, lose his uncle, Victor, and falls into a pit of melancholia refusing all activities for perseverance including consumption and communication. In his absolute destitute, he prefers not to do anything like Herman Melville’s Bartleby. After rescued by his friends at the central park where he lives as a homeless, Marco learns and unfolds the truth of his origin by working for his grandfather, Effing. With Solomon, his father, Marco also looks for the contradictory significance of the west going through tremendously unbelievable events. The paper reveals how this journey to find the meaning of frontierism ends with epiphany on ideological myth of frontierism and its effects in American mind.

This essay aims to analyze the time-space strategies in The Eve of St Agnes, Keats’s narrative poem and fantasy romance, focusing on the variation of verb tense in it. The irregular variations in verb tense can be often regarded as a shortcoming of skill necessary for storytelling. These variations, however, are only featured in a way that changes the narrator’s past tense reporting into the present tense. Moreover this phenomenon is mostly found in the situations that involve the characters’s movement. Present tense narration combined with movement affects the reader’s perception of time-space. Present tense gives immediacy to the narrated scene and the character’s tri-dimentional movements indicate special displacement. When this movement continues as in the case of Beadman, the reader’s imagination widens spatially. Through this expansion of space and motion, we were able to perceive the passage of time. However when Madline stops all movement and dreams in fancy in her room, the present tense used in the scene stops the normal flow of time and change an instance into eternity. The confused verb tenses are the strategies to construct time-space appropriate for the fantasy world in the narrative mode.

This study aims to analyze the similarities of totalitarian notion between George Orwell’s view of Totalitarianism embodied in Nineteen Eighty-Four and oppressive group consciousness implicated in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Both of the works address that the societies controlled by violence and one dominant ideology force the minority to become the mentally ill, regardless of whether it is a totalitarian or democratic society. Winston in 1984 and Young-Hye in The Vegetarian face their guilty consciences in each dream which originates from bad experiences in their young age. The both meet their partners each who can support and understand them during the resistance against the system, but their rebellions fail. In the end, they are reduced to be changed into part of the system or become mentally ill. Two works demonstrate that it is the totalitarian society that doesn’t acknowledge personal differences, irrespective of certain age or system. Nevertheless, it is possible to expect more optimistic future toward a more open society in that In-Hye, Young-Hye’s elder sister in The Vegetarian,. shows us more mature perspective enough to recognize her identity and to accept minorities, compared to the world of 1984.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is a novel published after her death. This novel differs from other major slave narratives in some veins. It tells traumatic experiences of an African from the point of view of the sold person. Writing this novel, Hurston had a difficult time understanding the fact that Africans sold fellow Africans, and white people bought Africans. She had believed otherwise till then. The tragedy of Cudjo and other 115 Africans who were the cargoes of the slave ship, Clotilda, started from the hubris and greed of an American slave trader, Timothy Meaher. He bet that he could import slavers even though the American law strictly prohibited the importation of African slaves. Hurston traced the footprints of those African slaves who built a school, a church, and a graveyard having unfulfilled dreams where they could go back to their motherland, Africa. During interviews, Hurston showed respect towards Cudjo, listened to his sorrowful stories, shared soul foods, and regarded him as one of her black ancestors. As for Cudjo, even though he looked like a devout believer of Christianity, his inner eyes and heart seemed to turn to Africa and many orishas who could be his beloved ancestors and African gods, and wholeheartedly gave a gesture of welcome and consolation.

Tom Stoppard was considered an ‘apolitical playwright’ owing to his early plays in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But after he released a series of political plays concerning political matters of Czechoslovakia and Eastern European countries in the late 1970s, not a few critics pointed out that he shifted his theatrical ground from ‘apolitical’ to ‘political.’ In relation to this issue, he claimed that he was not always concerned with political matters but deeply concerned with moral issues. He has not been indifferent to political matters but interested in freedom of speech and human rights issues. He argues that the world has taught us all that conservatism in the end simply is not fair enough. Thus, the question is not which is right, conservatism or progressivism but how to balance the free autonomous individual against some form of regulation needed for the common good. He has written a series of political plays concerning political situations of Eastern Europe. In these plays, he conflated a series of events which took place in dissolved Soviet with a set of values of the English middle class. In conclusion, the claim that Stoppard is an apolitical playwright is not in accordance with his career as a playwright. His writing political plays is not a sudden change of mind but a long-standing result of grappling with the problems of Eastern Europe.

This paper aims to examine the agreement of the growth of Hemingway’s heros and Nietzsche’s ‘The three metamorphoses’. Hemingway’s protagonists’ thought and a mode of living change from immature Nick in In Our Time into the most ideal character Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea. Nietzsche asserts the process of three metamorphoses through Zarathustra’s instruction, how the sprit becomes the camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Hemingway’s earlier protagonists, Nick, Frederic and Jake are suffering from the wound at battlefield. So they lead a life kneeling the load-bearing down like the camel. In the middle period, Jordan does not stay in the stage of camel any longer. He devotes himself to justice in Spain and universal brotherhood during The Spanish Civil War and becomes the lion who seeks for and tries to capture freedom. Reaching the last stage, Santiago realizes the most ideal ecological ethics and becomes the baby who has innocence and holy Yea, revealing the friendship and brotherhood to the marlin. Hemingway’s protagonists neither stay at earlier stage nor stop their growing. Therefore theses aspects match with Zarathustra’s instruction, the three metamorphoses.

The purpose of this study is to explore the distribution and the selection of anaphora by analyzing a survey filled out by Korean EFL learners and Americans, and to identify the semantic functions of English referring expressions, and to compare the cognitive differences of Korean EFL learners and Americans. The findings can be summarized as follows: first, regardless of the type of a topic, Korean EFL learners and Americans have common patterns of referring expressions. Second, Korean EFL learners and Americans share similarities in the types of referring expressions and their meanings. Third, Korean EFL learners have more restrictive (in focus, activated) cognitive statuses than Americans with less restrictive (in focus, activated, uniquely identifiable) cognitive statuses. Thus, this paper argues that Korean EFL learners have a narrow range of referring expressions, while Americans possess a wide range of referring expressions. This study is meaningful in that the findings from the survey, in which parameters (distance between two anaphors, interfering referents) occur, can help Korean EFL learners to understand the use of other anaphoric forms, instead of overusing pronouns as a referring expression.

This study discusses the duration of English consecutive stops across word boundaries. When two stops are adjacent across a word boundary, one is a word-final stop and the other is a word-initial stop. They share the stop closure. It is known that closure durations of voiceless word-final stops are longer than those of voiced stops in English and the places of articulation of both word-final and word-initial stops do not affect their closure durations. But the VOTs of the word-initial stops are known to be affected by the voicing and their places of articulation. In this study, the shared closure duration of the consecutive stops followed by the VOT of the word-initial stop was measured as the duration of the two consecutive stops. Both English and Korean speakers produced English nonsense word pairs that contain the consecutive stops. The results showed that English speakers’ production was affected by both stops; however, they relied more on the voicing and the places of the word-initial stops than on those of word-final stops. But the Korean speakers did not rely on the voicing and the places of articulation of the word-final stops at all due to the influence of the well-known coda neutralization in Korean phonology. They relied only on those of the word-initial stops. The average durations of the consecutive stops produced by the Koreans were longer than those by the English speakers.

We analyzed the distribution pattern and the tense connection pattern of the present perfect used in news reports, and found the following results. First, in the distribution research, the percentages (CNN: 8.12%, YHN: 8.65%) of the present perfect were higher than those in other genres, confirming that the present perfect is rather frequently used in the news report genre. Second, the present perfect was used not only in the Lead text for introducing hot news, but also in the middle for further explanation and in the end for conclusion. Third, in the research of the tense connection, although the present perfect was linked to various tenses, the present perfect was found to be connected most frequently to a tense specifically corresponding to the GPT (Given Primary Time) of each data set. In the CNN data, the present perfect was most frequently connected to its GPT, the simple present, highlighting on-site communications and immediateness of reporting more appropriately as a proximal deictic tense. In the Yonhap News data, the present perfect was connected most often to its GPT, the simple past, conveying more distance, formality, and objectivity of reporting as a distal deictic tense. Thus, the present perfect seems to be connected most frequently to a specific tense that is pragmatically chosen as GPT according to the reporting strategy of each news agency.

As noted by Napoli (1988), there are two kinds of expletive it, namely the extraposition it (EXT-it) and the raising it (R-it). The expletive construction accompanying EXT-it and the one with R-it behave differently with respect to some syntactic phenomena. They are the extraction of a wh-phrase from the clausal argument, controlling the PRO subject in an adjunct infinitival clause, the possibility of serving as a small clause complement, and the mobility of the clausal argument to subject position. To provide a reasonable analysis for the two expletive constructions in question, this paper proposes that in the expletive construction accompanying EXT-it the expletive is merged in the specifier of the clausal argument and then moves to the matrix [Spec, TP], whereas the expletive is merged directly in the matrix [Spec, TP] in the expletive construction with R-it. The syntactic differences between the two expletive constructions in question are successfully accounted for under this paper’s proposal with minor adoption of some relevant syntactic mechanisms. The cannonical expletive construction accompanying EXT-it may be led by R-it when the clausal argument is introduced by a wh-phrase, but this problematic case is explained under the assumption that the EPP feature of C must be checked off by a lexical item bearing the same value with respect to [±wh] feature.

This study focuses on non-uniform realizations of inflectional morphemes in English. The realizations of past and plural morpheme have traditionally been described as a simple case of progressive assimilation since both inflectional affixes seemingly show identical rightward direction of assimilation. However, when plurally inflected words are spoken by native speakers of English, the plural morpheme shows different realizations from those of the past tense morpheme. The problematic examples are noun stems ending in sonorants and voiced obstruents because such examples do not have any assimilatory motivations to change from the plural morpheme /z/ to [s]. Such unexpected realizations of the /z/ to [s] are ascribed to factors like markedness and articulatory difficulties. In addition to these, the inflectional morpheme occurring in the post-consonantal final position of a word is very difficult to maintain its voicing. Thus, the realization of the /z/ to [s] can be understood as the improvement of markedness and easy of articulation along with less efforts compared to the past tense morpheme in English. A constraint-based analysis provided in this study takes into accounts such motivations and proposes a unified constraint ranking which can explain the realizations of both past tense and plural formation examples when words are used in sentences.

This study aims to investigate the phenomenon of a series of boredom in English class by qualitative research to understand first-year students’ experience of boredom in high school. For this study, 24 college students majoring in nursing participated in semi-structured interview via zoom for a rapid response to COVID-19. The results of this study were as follows. First, participants described precursors of boredom as learners’ attitudes, teaching method, and English classes which were too difficult for them. Second, their behaviors were divided into two phases; Some tried to prevent boredom and keep it away and others were frustrated and were not engaged in class activities due to boredom. Third, they used boredom coping strategies such as self-hypnosis, taking the bull by the horns, and self reflection. It is suggested that English teachers need to promote teacher-student interaction to overcome boredom and to get all students engaged in learning and they have to use teaching materials without getting bored. And also, English teachers should bear in mind that they encourage students to take charge of their learning process. The findings will give insights into a better understanding of learners with boredom in college English class and coping with it.

This study aims to examine the characteristics of pedagogic translation from a functionalist approach. The study analyzed the unique aspects of English source text (ST) and Korean target text (TT) of an EBS-CSAT book, as an example of Korea-specific pedagogic translation. By analyzing the subject matters of ST, this study found that the English passages are mostly non-literal texts dealing with topics such as humanities, sociology, science, technology, etc. In this regard, the text type of ST of pedagogic translation can be categorized into the informative text or documentary translation, respectively suggested by Reiss (1977) and Nord (1997). Meanwhile, the results of TT analysis are as follows; first, the EBS-CSAT book translations used referential functions frequently by preferring explicit translation both in the translation of function words and content words. Second, the EBS-CSAT book translations showed less tendency to separate sentences, thereby generating long translated sentences. Third, the EBS-CSAT book translations preferred to keep the ST word order. These results imply that pedagogic translation has a tendency to take an ST-oriented approach reflecting the purpose and aspects of usage as foreign language study materials, supporting the functionalist view on translation.

Lexical inference is an important vocabulary learning method, but it is still unknown whether an explicit instruction of inference strategies would improve inference accuracy. In this study, it is investigated whether an explicit instruction of word-meaning inference strategies in class contributes to the success of meaning inference while reading. Two reading texts materials containing 10 pseudowords each were created (Hamada, 2013). Thirty four Korean EFL university students participated in the task experiments. The participants’ meaning inference accuracy rate was tested two times (pretest and posttest after treatment). It was found that the experiment group was significantly more advanced than the control group in word-meaning inference rate. The results indicated that an explicit instruction of word-meaning inference strategies was conducive to successful inference of unknown vocabulary. It is suggested that careful sections of inference strategies for instruction with consideration of learner’s proficiency levels would be necessary, that continuous training of inference strategies with practical application for reading comprehension and vocabulary learning is recommended, and that global strategies rather than local strategies would be necessary for learners to become successful in word-meaning inference.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of self-evaluating the causes of incorrect answers in TOEIC listening class. Students were supposed to submit self evaluation reports every week, take pre and post mock TOEIC listening test, and answer 5 survey questions. 19 students’ data were selected out of 28 students. This data was divided into two groups, diligent group(9) and lazy group(10) and analyzed. To achieve this purpose, four questions were asked. 1. Was it effective in improving students’ TOEIC listening score? 2. Was it helpful for students’ positive attitude for further learning? 3. What is an effective way of writing the report? 4. How effective was it for the researcher’s teaching activities? The results of data analysis were as follows; 1. Students’ TOEIC listening scores improved in both groups, so it cannot be said that it was a direct result from writing the reports. But, diligent groups got much higher scores in mid and final term exams. 2. The survey showed it was helpful for students’ having a positive attitude for further learning in both groups. 3. Student 9’s case showed how to write the report effectively, which was the only case of high improvement in the diligent group. 4. It was helpful for the researcher to organize class activities and understand and communicate with students.