Earticle

This paper aims at analyzing the significances of the decolonizing process that the orature of the flying Africans represents, based on Toni Morrison’s use of African values, characteristics, and community as an alternative to mainstream assimilation or radical separatism. It centers on Milkman’s fateful relationship with Pilate’s storytelling that transforms his search for gold into an acknowledgement of his heritage, uncovering the legend of the flying Africans. Through her storytelling role as educator of Milkman about his ancestors, Milkman’s awareness of the black community, the black culture, and the Southern natural world around him leads him to remind his narrow-minded thinking as well as his own material selfishness. Being sympathetic to both his father’s distorted ambition and his mother’s pathetic helplessness, he sees his heritage with a proud look. In the reincarnation of his great grandfather, Milkman flies as his ancestors flew, leaving a legacy for women’s tales and children’s folk songs. Accordingly, Morrison’s use of African modes of orature is connected to the African American’s dream for freedom, being related with a way of mediating gaps between the Africa’s tradition and the African American’s culture.

Based on the narrative structure of Greek epic cycle, Kyclos, the study explores Elizabeth Bishop’s In the Waiting Room. Bishop’s autobiographical poem, In the Waiting Room has many circular images with a cycle structure, and these aspects follow the Kyclos narrative. A common girl in the poem experiences heroic adventure, and the significance of her daily episode takes on historic and universal totality. This poem shows a “thematic bridge” of Kyclos epic, which is used to “continue a unified storyline lying beyond the boundaries of the poem at hand”(Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 3). The beginning description of the poem summarizes the ending episode of Bishop’s memoir, “The Country Mouse” so that the beginning word, “Worcester” is highlighted as a meaningful place throughout the poet’s entire life. It also begins in medias res (in the middle of) like Kyclos epic employing reverberation technique. Experiencing a cyclic adventure, “a going and returning,” the small girl of this poem is dramatically transformed into an epic hero. She is grown up spiritually by establishing a new connection with total strangers.

As one of the early writers in African American literature, Olaudah Equiano is well known for his Interesting Narrative, which is considered a prototypical slave narrative. Through the maneuver of rhetorical devices, he astutely criticizes the inhuman violence of slave trade and the vicious practices of the slavery across the Atlantic Ocean. He demonstrates how a slave’s life can be drastically transformed into a story of success. His narrative is significant in its contribution to the abolition of slavery with his poignant description of the inhuman treatment of slaves and the vicious institution of slavery. He astutely recognized the importance of a language and culture. The hybridity of his cultural identity, African and English, is parallel to his life as a navigator. Sea becomes a conduit for him that connects lands and a sphere that offers him the opportunity to visit many places and meet people from all kinds of walk of life. Above all, the acquisition of a new language, English, and later the skill for navigation becomes the most important tools for him, becoming a man of intellect and culture. This paper examines how the author appropriates the language, culture, and even religion of the west and turns them into valuable assets that helped change his status from a slave to a freeman and rise to a man of power to write an influential narrative.

This study is a corpus-based analysis of animal images and symbolism in John Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. The previous studies indicate that the physical features and crawling process of land turtle and the Joad family present a strong corresponding relationship so that the land turtle bears rich symbolic connotations. The aim of this study is to put forward a more comprehensive animal image by using AntConc corpus analyzing tool. A turtle, rabbits, dogs, and a snake are prominent animal images in The Grapes of Wrath and they carry rich symbolic meanings. Using the method of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, the researchers mainly apply the tools of the keyword list and concordance in AntConc to analyze the language features and plot development of the novel. The corpus analysis has brought a new perspective to the analysis of literary texts even though this study only explores such analysis at vocabulary, sentence and plot levels. According to the analysis of the corpus, the researchers have found that the description of animal imagery has made an important contribution to the plot development and the overall depiction of the characters. There is still a room for further corpus studies of literary texts.

This study examines the adaptation technique, the breaking linear timeline, and its effects in the movie Little Women(2019) by Greta Gerwig. She adapted the original novel of Louisa May Alcott, connecting the messages of love, art, and money with the modern viewpoint of them. For this, Gerwig dissects the time of the original novel, jumping back and forth in the story. Shifting timeline back and forth is a key factor of feminist theatrical apparatuses, which is used for unveiling how to make the now from the past. Ambitious and talented women from the past have made their ways regardless of the patriarchal social oppression on their economical independence and marriage. Gerwig begins the movie with four sisters’ adulthood, making it flash back to their childhood unlike the novel. Her creative and smart adaptation gives Little Women a modern feminist interpretation; the modern appreciation of female characters, social criticism on the inequality of women’ potentials, the ending that Alcott wanted―Jo who remains as a spinster. The happy ending without marriage and the women’ pursuit of their own dreams reflect the fourth wave of the feminist movement, which pursues egalitarian relationship and co-existence with men by denying the conventional ideas of sexuality, marriage, and family.

The year 2020 drives both educators and learners to face the un-contact future in educational fields. Since 2010, we have heard about flipped learning as so-called trendy pedagogical term. However, there are so many guesses and misunderstandings to prohibit us from endeavoring flipped learning. This study starts to change the general concept of flipped learning for my research purpose. By forming a working concept of flipped learning as a paradigm, not a specific method, and utilizing team-based learning methods for during-class activities, I came up three research questions: 1) How does flipped learning action sheet function for learners to participate in group discussion?; 2) How does flipped learning action sheet serve for learners’ understanding of text and their satisfaction of the class?; 3) Are flipped learning action sheet and quiz effective tools as a precedent task? Grounded on two questionnaires the result demonstrates that flipped learning action sheet enables the learner to contribute to group discussion easily and increases the level of class satisfaction as well as understanding of the text. With these results, I can suggest that flipped learning action sheet and taking a quiz are useful precedent methods for educator to construct team-based flipped learning paradigm.

The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of the frequency of eight major middle verbs (photograph(s), wash(es), handle(s), cut(s), break(s), translate(s), frighten(s), and read(s)) and adverbs within the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. The major characteristics of middle constructions are that the subject of middle constructions must be a definite NP and that an intransitive verb can occur in the middle construction only when a definite NP has an event which is an intrinsic characteristic or property of the definite NP. The major point of middle constructions is that the adverb well is the most widely used collocation along with the middle verbs photograph(s), wash(es), handle(s), translate(s), and read(s) in American English, whereas the adverb well is the most commonly used collocation along with the middle verbs photograph(s), wash(es), handle(s), and read(s) in British English. When it comes to the middle verb break(s), break(s) even is the most widely used collocation in both American English and British English. As for the middle verb cut(s), cut(s) deeply is the most frequently used collocation in American English, whereas cut(s) sharply is the most commonly used collocation in British English.

This paper aims to examine whether Korean college students’ experiences with prior context can influence their understanding of temporal expressions. The experiment investigated the perspective implied by prior context would influence our understanding of ambiguous metaphorical expressions about time in English and Korean. The results of the experiment indicate that prior context can influence temporal reasoning. Specifically, in the case of English target sentence, the number of time-moving consistent responses significantly differs between the time-moving and mixed context conditions, and between the time-moving and ego-moving context conditions. While, in the case of Korean target sentence, the number of time-moving consistent responses did not significantly differ between the time-moving and mixed context, between the mixed-context and ego-moving context, and between the time-moving and ego-moving context conditions. Based on the results of the experiment, I conclude that prior context of motion can influence Korean people’s understanding of metaphorical expressions about time in English and Korean. Further, this study shows that Korean people exhibit a clear preference for time-moving metaphor and they produce a greater proportion of Monday responses relative to Friday in Korean than English.

This study investigated the time course dynamics of spoken word recognition among Korean learners of English. Multiple candidates were activated when a word was auditorily provided and these candidate words included onset competitors that shared a beginning (candy, candle) and rhyme competitors sharing an ending (candle, sandal). Although onset competitors have been found to be a substantial competitor in L1 and L2, little has been known about relative effect of rhyme competitors compared with the that of onset ones in L2. This paper examined L1 (Korean) and L2 (English) word recognition by the late bilinguals. In each language, eye gaze was recorded as the participants heard the stimuli and viewed the display of the pictures: ones corresponding to onset and a rhyme competitors, and one depicting an unrelated word and the drawing of the target words. Eye tracking results revealed a strong competition between onset competitors and the target words in L1 or L2. In contrast, competition between rhyme competitors and the target word turned out to be insignificant in either L1 or L2. Hence, Rhyme competition may not be a maximally efficient factor in speech recognition process either in L1 or L2.

Tag questions in English represent a structure that, by being added to the preceding clause, questions or verifies its content. Despite their wide usage, little has been said about the grammatical source of tag questions. Tag questions are essentially divided into two classes; the regular tag (e.g., did/didn’t she?) and the cleft tag (e.g., is/isn’t it?). Among the two available types of tag, Barros & van Craenenbroeck (2013) extensively studied the tag preference, claiming that the cleft tag is the default one (named as Default Non-Isomorphism). By contrast, the results of our acceptability judgment tasks showed that the regular tag in fact is the favored one, with the use of the cleft tag being sensitive to the focused/adjacent element of the host clause. Namely, the cleft tag is preferred only when a sufficient amount of focus is present. This finding is empirically attested in assorted conditions involving the two types of tag questions. Examined conditions principally varied by the referent of the fragment answer preceding the tag question at stake (i.e., whether the fragment is referring to the subject or object of the forgoing sentence). In addition, the presence/absence of the polarity answer particle (i.e., yes or no) anteceding the tag question was tested.

This study investigated the acquisition mechanism for foreign vowel categories, focusing on the production and perception of English mid back vowel /ɔ/ by native Korean speakers. English mid back vowel /ɔ/ does not have a corresponding counterpart in the Korean vowel inventory, so through the production and perception of /ɔ/, the phonetic similarities/differences to the native vowel categories and to English adjacent vowel categories were analyzed. The results of the production experiment revealed that the effect of English experiences on the phonetic accuracy is significant, and no phonetic merger of /ɔ/ to other vowels was observed for the high proficiency group, suggesting that a new phonemic category for /ɔ/ has been established. The productions of the low proficiency group were phonetically inconsistent and showed a vowel merger to Korean /u/. In perception, a significant effect of English experiences on the perceptual accuracy was found, and the low proficiency listeners failed to distinguish /ɔ/ from /ɑ/. It is predicted that the two speaker groups have different vowel categories in their phonological system, and the native phonological system affects the production and perception of foreign phonemic categories.

The aim of this study is to analyze some adjective constructions, such as likely-type, tough-type, necessary-type and probable-type in English special adjective constructions. We have searched some data connected with English adjective constructions named above from school grammar to early transformational grammar GB-theory and Minimalist program. Finally we find that there are not only few research date but also few explanations on special English adjective constructions in school grammar. In early transformational grammar, to explain raising constructions they introduce the notions of deep structure and surface structure. But there was no theoretically sufficient explanation for the reason of raising constructions. In GB they attempted to explain the reason of raising constructions by using the theories and principles. Despite the attempts used GB theory, some problems occurred to raising constructions without solutions. As the attempt to brief sub-theories and maximize the explanation of grammar, they introduce Minimalist Program. This thesis accepts Chomsky’s Phase theory. Finally we insist that in generating sentence progress Phase theory have been the most explanatory than the other previous theories, connected with the special English adjective constructions in raising.

With a corpus-assisted discourse analysis (CADA) on South China Sea (SCS) issues in Chinese, American, and Philippine newspapers over the past 10 years, this paper aimed to reveal ways of representing the SCS issues from three leading newspapers (China Daily, the Manila Times, and the New York Times) and expound the complicated relations between language use and the historical-socio-political contexts, which, in the end, provides valuable context for the study of the dispute between Japan and South Korea as well as other significant issues. The synchronic and diachronic analyses of the issues from 2010 to 2019 were conducted through a synergy of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics (CL). The results showed that the representations in China Daily are generally cooperative negotiation-oriented. Those in the Manila Times were inclined toward being proactively and radically oriented during the Aquino III period, while they were moderately oriented during the Duterte period, which is characterized by instability. Those in the New York Times showed a tendency be militarization- and internationalization-oriented. The method used in this study enabled us to find semantic fields within text corpora to explore political issues connected to relevant countries.

This paper suggests that the frozen scope of the DO in the IO-DO order is triggered by the choice function interpretation of the IO. This analysis is against H. Lee’s (2020) argument that the scope rigidity of the sentence can be explained as an effect of the specificity constraint that topicality of an indefinite IO in the IO-DO order is interpreted as specific, which triggers a wide-scope interpretation over the universally quantified DO. Although the preferred scope can be determined by the argument, it cannot explain the difference between the scope freezing effect and scope ambiguity in the IO-DO order when the numeral-quantified IO appears. The paper also argues that the smaller the number of the numeral-quantified IO and the stronger the choice function interpretation, the greater the scope freezing effect of the IO against the DO. The wide scope of an indefinite recipient (i.e., etten haksayng-eykey/ul ’a certain student-DAT/ACC’) or a DAT-marked recipient (i.e., haksayng(-tul)-eykey ’student(-PL)-DAT’) following a universally quantified or a numeral-quantified DO in the IO-DO order in the VP domain triggers the scope freezing effect against the DO. These are the peculiarities that the ditransitive constructions where the dative verb cwu ’give’ or the serial verb combined with (-a/e) cwu appears show.

This paper describes conceptual blending theory and cognitive neuroscience, displaying that literary language settles down cognitive science and cognitive linguistics. The appearance of the cognitive linguistics set the stage for the consideration of metaphor. Metaphor pervades everyday language, thought and behavior, and not just poetic language. Robert Frost searches for his poetic materials in the surrounding nature and human society, and speaks through his poetic personae in plain and simple tone in his poetry his deep insights of human life. He exposes the difficulties and hazards we meet in the course of life without concealment, but creates the human figures who do not resign or surrender. Paul Churchland asserts the theory of representation from researches of cognitive neurology. Based on the representational theory, representations of our body and brain can be expressed as the positions of phase state spaces by neuron exercise. Also I raise questions based on both the theory of cognitive science and the conceptual theory. More widely, within the theory of cognitive science, I apply those theories to a poem titled “After Apple-Picking.” This approach provides that the critical idea in consilience has raised questions as to our fundamental principles and given them new ingenious theories.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how pre-service teachers of elementary schools perceive culture-related contents in the 2015 national curriculum of English, the necessity of teaching culture in English classes, and English-culture integrated lessons. Total 26 pre-service teachers who were seniors and enrolled in the course ‘Elementary English Education and Culture’ participated in the study. The data were collected from two sources - the participants’ papers in which they described their thoughts and reasons toward the culture-related contents in the curriculum and the necessity of teaching culture, and their lesson plans for English-culture integrated teaching. A theme-based data analysis revealed the following: 1) the pre-service teachers perceived the culture-related contents positively, but they also expressed their concerns that the curriculum doesn’t provide important information such as achievement standards for teaching culture, 2) 25 out of 26 participants agreed strongly upon the necessity of teaching culture with various reasons, and 3) the pre-service teachers’ perceptions on English-culture integrated lessons converged into three aspects - how to select cultural contents, how to integrate English and culture, and how to make elementary students understand various cultures without prejudice.

This study aimed at exploring Korean parental attitudes about bilingualism and bilingual education for their children who temporarily stay in the U.S. Data were collected, from five immigrant parents, through narrative questionnaire, participant observations, and in-depth interviews. Research findings showed that their future perception of returning to home country let them adopt instrumental orientation for learning EIL (English as an international language). Although the children experienced Korean language attrition, the parents maintained English-centered educational policy to maximize the effectiveness from their temporary stay in an English-speaking country. In addition, Korean parents were highly interested in English learning, but they were reluctant to take school ESL courses designed for non-native immigrant children. Instead, they wanted their children placed in mainstream English courses, thinking that ESL courses were too elementary for their children. Lastly, they had different expectations in proficiency of two languages: cognitive and academic language proficiency in their native language and basic interpersonal communicative skills in English. Korean parental attitudes were basically constructed based on their future perception and current temporary stay.