Earticle

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 paper concerns the so-called Swiping elliptical construction in English involving a wh-phrase followed by a preposition (e.g., Where from? as a response to I just moved here). The construction displays quite idiosyncratic properties in many respects: it applies only to a limited set of wh-expressions and prepositions, occurs only in Sluicing environments, and typically disallows an overt correlate in the antecedent clause. The paper reports a corpus investigation for the uses of the construction in real life and suggests a direct interpretation (DI) approach couched upon a construction-based HPSG framework that posits neither clausal sources nor derivational processes. It shows that the DI analysis can serve better in accounting for the semi-productive Swiping construction in English.

The current study examined the influence of individual trait such as Need-For-Touch level (NFT; high vs. low) and swiping orientation (vertical vs. horizontal) on product evaluation and preference when using touch-screen interface like a smart phone and a tablet. Swiping is one of the most common interaction techniques for changing pages or searching some aligned pictures on touch-screen interface and it can be used in vertical and horizontal orientations. The experiment revealed a significant interaction between swiping orientation and NFT on preference, however the interaction on change-in-price of given products was only marginally significant. To be specific, high NFT participants reported higher preference for horizontal-swipe than vertical-swipe products, but such difference did not occur with low NFT participants. The current study illustrates the influence of swiping orientation and NFT on product preference and it provides a new perspective of design principles especially for online shopping websites.

The main purpose of this paper to scrutinize to what extent advanced L2 learners would differ from L1 speakers in the anticipation, integration, and repair of syntactic information during sentence processing. For this purpose, we conducted two on-line self-paced reading experiments for processing multiple Sluicing (or TP ellipsis) with two PP remnants in English by both L1 speakers and L2 learners and found some interesting findings as follows. First, L1 speakers showed an early effect of processing both the first preposition pied-piped and the first SWIPING-ed (or inverted preposition) PP remnant conditions in the same way, pointing to the fact that they anticipated upcoming information (TP ellipsis), whereas the L2 learners did not. The latter result is in line with those in other works showing that L2 learners do not expect upcoming syntactic categories in the same fashion as L1 speakers do. Second, L2 speakers showed a late effect of processing both the first and the second SWIPING-ed PP conditions analogously, implying either an increase in working memory or the use of different repair tactics compared with L1 speakers.