Showing papers in "Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics in 2015"

Research in English for Specific Purposes in the 21st Century

Abstract: This article reviewed 311 research articles in the English for Specific Purposes journal (ESPj) from 2000 to 2014 with respect to research disciplines, topics, and methodologies. The aims of this study were to determine which features are focused on in ESPj papers and to which directions they are oriented toward in their efforts to draw attention to research areas in the Korean ESP circle. The results of this study indicate that ESP research is conducted on academic disciplines such as English for academic purposes (EAP), ESP, and business, and then on such topics as academic writing, pedagogy, and office conversations, and finally on qualitative rather than quantitative research methods. These results imply that ESP research needs to be expanded with respect to disciplines, topics, and methodologies, thus contributing more comprehensively to ESP practices and research.

On the Licensing Condition for Corrective Fragments

Abstract: In this article I firstly claim that corrective fragments are only felicitous if their correlate is contrastively focused following Griffiths and Liptak"s Felicity condition on contrastive fragments. I have further shown that the felicity condition on corrective fragments works cross-linguistically. From the semantic point of view I secondly argue that corrective fragments contrary to the non-elliptical counterpart can inherit the propositions presupposed by the antecedent clause, however, the longer version of answers such as VP-ellipsis answers and putative full sentence answers do not have such property due to the fact that elided clauses must be ‘e-GIVEN." Finally, I conclude that the e-GIVENNESS should be taken as the best condition in explaining how corrective fragments can be licensed and at the same time can precisely capture the presupposition inheritance property by arguing that Weir"s (2014) QUD-GIVENNESS is an unnecessary, surplus and redundant condition in the case of corrective fragments.

Effects of Grammar Instruction in Context with Writing Practice on Students" Manuscript Writing in an EAP Course

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to examine whether grammar instruction in context and genre-based writing practice have positive influences on writing a final presentation manuscript in an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) course. Also, in order to suggest a more practical English program which combines writing and presentation in EFL contexts, the participants’ responses toward the course were also reviewed. A total of 94 Korean university students majoring in engineering participated in the study, and the findings are as follows. First, grammar instruction in context was effective on improving the students" grammatical accuracy on the final manuscript writings in the experimental group except for "subject-verb agreement" and "articles," which seem to be correlated to the negative influence of the students" L1. Second, two thirds or more of the students were satisfied with genre-based writing practice. Especially, they preferred the types of controlled writing and recombination to free writing and paraphrasing. Third, 26.6 percent of the students had difficulty following the course, which could be due to their little writing experience. Lastly, about a third of the students requested for more interactive discussion in English during manuscript writing. Based on the findings, this study provides some pedagogical suggestions for both instructors and EFL students in EAP courses.

Korean Speakers" Knowledge of the Semantics and Pragmatics of Viewpoint Aspect in English

Abstract: Semantically, viewpoint aspect encodes boundedness, the specification (or lack thereof) of a temporal boundary. Perfective viewpoint is bounded and situations presented in the perfective have reached the temporal boundary, whereas imperfective viewpoint is unbounded and situations presented in the imperfective have not. This semantic difference is reflected through the imperfective paradox interaction: telic predicates in the imperfective, but not those in the perfective, lose their completion entailments. Pragmatically, viewpoint aspect serves different discourse functions; the imperfective provides background information and it suspends the plot, whereas the perfective provides foreground information and it moves the plot along. This study examines Korean speakers" understanding of the aforementioned semantic and pragmatic properties of viewpoint aspect in English. Results showed successful acquisition of the pragmatics but delayed acquisition of the semantics. It is argued that this disparity is accounted for by transfer of partial completion construals of perfectives in Korean. It also addresses implications of the results in light of the Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis arguing for the vulnerability of the syntax-pragmatics interface as compared to the syntax-semantics interface.

Anaphoricity of Ellipsis

Abstract: This study explores Merchant"s (2001, 2004, 2008) Island Repair approach for VPE and sluicing and attempts to show its problems, by critically reviewing the notions of i) MaxElide and ii) Scope parallelism between the antecedent clause and the focus structure of the elided clause suggested by Merchant. This study thereby confirms the necessity of a semantic consideration for a proper explanation of the anaphoric difference between VPE and Sluicing. A supplementary argumentation is provided for Event Semantics account proposed by Wee (2015), which claims for the event semantic difference between the two elliptical constructions.

Vowel Quality and English Verb Stress

Abstract: In this paper, vowel distributions of 3260 English monomorphemic verbs are examined to verify the claim that vowel height plays a considerable role in stress assignment in English. The claim was made by research on English nouns from a lexical database, CELEX(Baayen, Piepenbrock and Gulikers, 1995). It has found that vowel quality, especially vowel height, has a significant influence on stress location. Results of the current study provide further evidence for the claim that vowel height is related to stress location: First, lowness attracts stress; Second, a high front lax vowel, [?], is the second frequent vowel in unstressed syllables following a schwa.; Third, in stressed light syllables, a mid vowel, [?], appears most frequently while a low vowel [ae] is the most common vowel winning stress over a heavy syllable. These findings offer insights into the relations between phonetic properties of vowel phonemes and the nature of stress.

Remarks on English Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is two folds: one is to examine the controversies among the existing research over the syntactic properties of English non-Restrictive Relative Clauses (hereafter, NRRCs) as opposed to Restrictive Relative Clauses (hereafter, RRCs). Secondly, the internal structure of English NRRCs is proposed in order to accommodate the disputes from the previous research such as Quirk, et. al. (1985), Borsley (1992, 1997), Smits (1988), McCawley (1998), Lobeck (2000), Huddleston & Pullum (2008), Vries (2002, 2006), Aoun & Li (2003), Arnold (2004), and Arnold & Borsely (2008), we argue that English NRRCs, unlike RRCs, are XP-adjuncts, (contra Lobeck 2000, Aarts 2001, 2008, among others), arriving at a conclusion that NRRC involves a discontinuous constituent. Furthermore, this Wh-CP in English NRRC enters into the syntactic derivation via Sidewards movement (hereafter, SM) in the sense of Hornstein (2001, 2009) in order to eventually form a single-rooted tree. The kind of architecture we advocate for English NRRC in this study is on a par with what Newson (2006) has argued for: English RRC is an X’-Adjunct and NRRC is an XP-Adjunct. Most of the troublesome properties that have long been discussed in literature receive a new analysis under the current study. For example, the obviation of WCO effect or ‘weakest crossover’ (Lasnik & Stowell 1991) observed in English NRRC, unlike in RRCs (Authier & Reed 2005), can be straightforwardly accounted for, if the two distinct structures are to be adopted. The theoretical implication of this proposal is that there are two types of adjuncts, one is X’ adjunct and the other is XP-adjunct, contra Hornstein (2009).

Perceptual Vowel Insertion in English-based Nonsense Words by Korean Learners

Abstract: This study explores the role of L1 constraints in sound perception in English-based nonsense words by Korean learners of English Specifically, the study examined the effect of the unreleased coda constraint in Korean when perceiving word final palatal sibilants in English-based nonsense words Korean learners in low and high levels of English proficiency participated in the study The results showed that the learners with low proficiency levels in English were more likely to perceive the illusory vowel /i/ following a word final palatal sibilant in nonsense words Their perception showed the influence of frication duration after a word final palatal sibilant Compared to the high level learners, the low level learners were more sensitive to acoustic properties of frication noise of a word final palatal sibilant, yet incorrectly employed them as the cues to the vowel /i/ The high level learners showed a different pattern in that their perception was influenced by the relative duration of the vowel instead of frication duration The results of the present study using English-based nonsense words indicate that Korean low-level learners of English are significantly under the influence of L1 constraints in L2 perception of word final palatal sibilants

English Argumental Compounds and Wordfixation

Abstract: English compounds like ‘truck driver’ and ‘truck maker’ show an interesting property: the non-head is an internal argument of the base verbs ‘drive’ and ‘make’. The compounds belong to a subclass called ‘synthetic,’ ‘deverbal,’ or ‘argumental.’ Writers have proposed theories to simplify grammar by assuming that the Thetarole Projection Principle works both in morphology and syntax. I will analyze the principle in detail, and demonstrate that it has critical limits. The principle should be revised to the extent that the revision undermines basic schemes of the principle. Instead, I will show with empirical evidence that ‘truck driver’ is a root compound. And it is also true of ‘truck maker’, except that ‘truck driver’ is coined by concatenating two free lexical words, while ‘truck maker’ is a product of the process of attaching a bound stem ‘maker’ to the base ‘truck’, wordfixation.

Register Variation in the Lexico-Grammatical and Functional Usages of MAKE and TAKE

Abstract: This study explored the spoken-written register variation in the lexico-grammatical and functional usages of two high-frequency verbs make and take with in-house corpora including academic lectures and textbooks of American universities. All uses ofeach verb in each academic register were analyzed and compared with regard to frequency and collocate. The results showed that both verbs and their delexical uses were significantly more frequent in lectures than in textbooks. However, no register variation was found significant in phrasal and/or idiomatic uses. The nature of common collocates of each verb also varies in register, but stance words were common collocates of both verbs in the textbooks. Both similarities and differences in the usages of make and take between lectures and textbooks are informative to identify the general, non-arbitrary structural and semantic patterns of high-frequency verbs across registers and to apply them to L2 instruction and research.

Palatalization of in Old English

Abstract: Palatalization of /sk/ spelled with in Old English has been rarely treated within a theoretical framework, whereas that of /k/ has been often theoretically analyzed (Lass & Anderson 1975, Hogg 1979, Peinovich 1979, Moon 2011, 2014). The goals of this study are to investigate what properties characterize palatalization of /sk/ and to show how they can be analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory. There are some noticeable characteristics of palatalization of /sk/. First, /sk/ is palatalized in the word-initial position regardless of the following environments. This study has suggested that this can be accounted for manly by the pressure of the highly ranked constraint * #[/sk/. Secondly, the [back] feature of the vowels following /sk/ determines whether or not palatalization occurs to /sk/ in the word-medial position, which is predicted by MatchR(±bk) ranked above MatchL(±bk) in this study. Finally, the seemingly contradictory pattern shown by the umlauted words in the word-medial palatalization can also be incorporated to palatalization of /sk/ without reranking of the constraints explaining the non-umlauted words. The proposed analysis couched in OT-CC allows us to succeed in explaining the opacity manifested by the umlauted words with the help of the interaction of constraints.

Learners" Awareness of Comma Usage and Its Effect on Two Types of Writing Tasks

Abstract: This study examines Korean college students’ awareness of English comma usage and how this awareness subsequently affects their use of commas in two types of writing tasks—a fill-in-the-blank task and a free-writing task. Four different comma usages were investigated in this study: (1) commas with nonrestrictive elements; (2) commas with coordinating conjunctions linking independent clauses; (3) commas after introductory elements; and (4) commas with items in a series. The results showed that the participants regarded the second usage (i.e., connecting two clauses) as the primary function of the comma which most participants were able to use accurately in the fill-in-the-blank task (91.8%), but not in the free-writing task (14.4%). It was also found that commas were most accurately employed for the third usage (i.e., commas after introductory elements) in both types of writing tasks even though none of the participants demonstrated awareness for this particular usage. The current results suggest that the students" awareness of comma usage is not always directly related to their performance and that their performance is often influenced by the nature of the writing task employed.

The Effects of Cognitive Complexity on Summary Quality by Korean College Students

Abstract: The study reported here examined the effects of cognitive complexity on the quality of summary writing among 50 Korean college students in the context of genre repetition. The cognitive complexity was varied in terms of text type (either expository or argumentative) and in terms of length (either limited to 70 words or not limited). These variables were adopted to test Robinson"s Cognition Hypothesis (CH) (2001a, 2002, 2003a, 2005a, 2007a). CH proposes that there are certain factors that influence cognitive complexity. The manipulation of these factors in a task leads to diverse demands. A range of studies have considered the effects of task complexity on learners" language production in terms of whether it becomes more complex, accurate, and/or fluent. However, little research has been conducted on summary quality from the perspective of the CH. Four independent variables were selected to reflect summary quality, namely copied items(CO), inaccurate ideas(IA), main idea selection(SE), and creative idea invention(I). The frequency of each variable was measured in summaries written under four conditions with different cognitive demands. The 50 participants were divided into four groups, each of which wrote summaries under a different cognitive load. The participants in every group had to write six summaries in the same genre. The first and the sixth summaries of each participant were analyzed to investigate summary quality and the effects of task repetition. A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted to determine the effects of repetition, and ANCOVA was used to control initial score differences related to the effects of text type and length limit. The results showed that task repetition significantly influenced SE out of four summary quality factors. The results suggest that differences in cognitive complexity have an effect on summary quality.