Jeong Tae-gu

Chung, Taegoo. 2007. An Event Structure Approach to the Korean Existential Construction. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 32-4, 779-801. This study proposes an event structure approach to the Korean existential construction -e issta, where the existential verb issta takes another verb/predicate as its complement. After it examines the problems with the previous work, the present study proposes the Extended Boundedness Condition which is based on the complex event structure of the existential const

This study examines the roles of semantic factors in the acquisition of English articles by Korean secondary school students. First, this study shows that semantic feature specificity plays a role in the acquisition of the indefinite article a and the zero article ø. Second, it shows that different uses of the definite article the present different levels of difficulty for Korean students of English. Third, noun countability is shown to affect L2-English learners' article choice, while the struc

Several studies have reported that L2 learners of English have great difficulty learning English unaccusative verbs and several learner-internal factors have been investigated regarding this difficulty: UG (linking rules and passive rules) (Balcom, 1997; Ju, 2000; Oshita, 1997; Yip, 1995; Zobl,1989) and L1 influence (Hirakawa, 1995; Montrul 2000). It was also reported that overpassivization of uanaccusative verbs is fossilized (Han 2006) and that Korean EFL learners have more difficulty with suc

This study examines the development of L2 English articles by Korean EFL students (middle school, high school and college students) in terms of the specificity feature. It shows that the acquisition order or difficulty level of L2 English articles is [-specific] a > [+specific] a > the > [+specific] Φ > [-specific] Φ (from the earliest/easiest to the latest/most difficult), which has not been presented in the literature. This finding implies that the prototypical meaning of a DP with the indefin

This study investigates variation in article use by Korean secondary school students of English. The study shows how two different tasks affect variation with respect to article types (a, the, and zero), proficiency level and the semantic feature, specificity. One task, a wide domain task, focused on grammar in general and the narrow domain task focused on articles. The statistical results showed that the subjects performed significantly better on the narrow domain task than on the wide domain t

This study investigates Korean EFL learners’ interlanguage in the course of the acquisition of preposition stranding and pied-piping in syntactic contexts such as relative clauses and wh-questions with respect to preposition placement. An acceptability judgment task was conducted with Korean EFL learners at different proficiency levels in order to look at the developmental path and the effects of various factors such as clause types, the argumenthood of prepositional phrases, and the interpretab

Yoon, Junghyoe, Shin, Eun Young, & Chung, Taegoo. 2015. Formality and Syntactic Dependency in the L2 Acquisition of Preposition Stranding and Pied-piping by Korean College EFL Learners. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 40-3, 451-474. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the acquisition of preposition stranding (PS) and preposition pied-piping (PP) in relative clauses by Korean learners of English. These alternating constructions have been reported to be restricted by the level of formality

This paper presents aspects of eight advanced Korean EFL speakers’ acquisition of English unaccusative verbs over a period of five years. It examines how three factors−L1 morphology, pragmatic causation, and animacy−have affected their English unaccusative verb grammar during that time. A forced-elicitation grammaticality judgment task was performed three times over this period. It showed that L1 morphology was the most persistent among these factors. The results are compared with Chung (2014),

This study explains the relations between ergative and middle verbs in English, and shows that ergative verbs are a subclass of middle verbs, and finally presents an account for the relations of the two verb classes. This research also provides an answer to the question which verbs participate in ergative formation or middle formation.

This study examines pedagogical appropriateness of metalinguistic terms being usedin pedagogical grammar books and English teacher’s guide books for secondary schoolteachers in Korea. It first presents criteria for good grammatical terms and evaluatesmetalinguistic terms based on the criteria. The terms are “subordinate conjunction” that,“relative pronoun” that, and “subordinate conjunction” after/before, all of which are termsfrom traditional grammar. This study proposes new terms for those for

Chung, Taegoo. 2004. Adverbs and Middles in English. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 29-4, 489-505. One of the mysteries of English middles is that the construction should be 'adorned' by an adverbial or some other modification like a modal, negation, or focus. The problem is that the modifications do not seem to share any common property. To explore the modification requirement for middles, this paper examines some previous syntactic and semantic analyses (Hoeskstra & Roberts 1993, Roberts 1987,

Chung, Taegoo. 2007. On English Adjectival Passives: Toward the Syntactic Approach. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 32-2, 213-239. This paper investigates the adjectival passive formation (APF) in English. The issue is whether APF is lexical or syntactic. This study first examines the lexical approaches (Wasow 1977, Levin & Rappaport 1986) where adjectival passives are formed in the lexicon, and the syntactic approaches (Embick 2004, Emonds 2000, 2006) where they are formed in the syntax. It pres

The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Sorace & Serratrice, 2009; Tsimpli & Sorace, 2006, among others) states that the grammar external interface is more vulnerable for advanced L2ers or bilinguals than the grammar internal interface, and L1 discourse influence is one factor responsible for their residual difficulty (Sorace, 2005; Sorace, Serratrice, Filiaci & Baldo, 2009). Their study, however, did not disentangle interface effects from L1 influence and it is unclear w

The present study investigates some problems with pedagogical English grammar and provides solutions to enhance the learnability of the pedagogical grammar, focusing on prepositions. In the pedagogical grammar books developed and used in Korea, a preposition or prepositional phrase is often treated as an adverb (phrase), adjective (phrase) or conjunction, depending on its function or distribution. This study points out that describing prepositions as differing categories in those materials is mi

This research investigates the effects of the universal semantic feature, specificity, in the L2 acquisition of English articles by Korean 6th graders. It reveals that specificity effects the young students' English acquisition, but the marker of specificity is different from the one reported in previous studies (Ionin et. al. 2004, 2009). In a forced multiple-choice written test, the elementary school students used the indefinite article a more in the specific context than in the non-specific c