A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts And
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THE ACQUISITION OF KOREAN PLURAL MARKING BY NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics By Sun Hee Hwang, M.A. Washington, DC November 28, 2012 Copyright 2013 by Sun Hee Hwang All Rights Reserved ii THE ACQUISITION OF KOREAN PLURAL MARKING BY NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS Sun Hee Hwang, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Donna Lardiere, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This study investigated the L2 acquisition of Korean plural marking by English-speaking learners within a feature-reassembly approach—a formal feature-based approach suggesting that native-like attainment of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge is determined by whether learners can reconfigure the formal features assembled in functional categories and lexical items in the L1 to those of the L2 (Lardiere, 2009). The Korean plural marker -tul shares some features with the English plural marker -s, but not others, especially regarding specificity, numeric vs. non- numeric quantification, classification, and human animacy. Moreover, Korean has another type of plural marker (also -tul) that attaches to various non-nominal elements to indicate a distributive reading. The difference in the specification of features in the plural lexical items of each language requires learners to reconfigure the relevant features, which can be modeled within a feature-reassembly approach. The two main objectives of this study are: (i) to characterize the learning task for L1 English - L2 Korean learners based on the cross-linguistic variation in number marking between the L1 and L2; and (ii) to investigate whether native-like attainment of both types of Korean plural marking is possible. 85 adult English-speaking learners at four proficiency levels (low-intermediate, high- intermediate, low-advanced, advanced) and 31 native Korean speakers performed five types of paper-and-pencil tasks—elicitation, acceptability judgment, preference, truth value judgment, and translation. The overall group results showed gradual development with increasing proficiency, but non-target-like performance lingered among several advanced learners. However, iii at least some highly proficient learners successfully incorporated required features such as specificity, non-numeric vs. numeric quantification, and distributivity into their representation of Korean plural marking. The [±human] feature restriction was not acquired by most participants even at advanced levels of proficiency. These findings suggest that identifying the relevant features and reassembling them into language-specific lexical items is difficult but nonetheless eventually attainable for some learners. The feature-reassembly approach sheds light on persistent L2 learning problems in morphosyntactic domain, correctly predicting both the obstacles and ultimate acquirability of Korean plural marking. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been completed without the help of many people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Professor Donna Lardiere for her endless help and invaluable feedback on my dissertation, as well as guidance throughout my graduate study at Georgetown. I cannot list what I am grateful to her for, because they are countless. She encouraged me to work on this project, and always guided me to extend and develop the project with her penetrating and crucial suggestions. By the help of her constant interest in Korean plural marking and untiring support for this study, I was able to continue working on this project. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my committee members for their insightful comments on this project. I am very grateful to Professor Ruth Kramer at Georgetown, who provided me with invaluable feedback on the theoretical analysis of Korean plural marking. I really appreciate her insightful suggestions on the earlier version of the analysis, which helped me develop the current analysis. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Young-Key Kim-Renaud at George Washington University, who consistenly gave crucial comments on Korean data examined in this dissertation and on this project overall. Specifically, her suggestion to include corpus data made this dissertation more fruitful. I am very fortunate to have them as my committee members who generously contributed their expertise and ideas to this project. One of the most challenging parts while working on this project was to recruit participants who are native English speakers learning Korean. I am deeply grateful to many people who helped me recruit participants in my study: Professor Mark A. Peterson at Brigham Young University, Dr. Gordon Jackson at Defense Language Institute, and many teachers at Sogang University’s Korean Language Education Center in Korea. I would like to thank all the participants including native Korean participants in this study, without whom this dissertation could not have been completed. I also wish to thank the faculty and staff at Georgetown. First of all, I’m very grateful to Alison Mackey for her constant interest in my work on acquisition. Serving as a RA for her gave me a timely chance to read the state-of-the-art articles on acquisition as well. I’d also like to thank Raffaella Zanuttini, Robert Podesva, Andrea Révész, Deborah Shiffrin, Graham Katz for their teaching and/or feedback on my work. I am also indebted to our department administrators, Erin Esch and Manela Diez. They have always been accessible and helped me whenever I needed administrative help since I first came to Georgetown. I would like to extend my deep gratitude to professors at Sogang University in Korea: Professor Sungbom Lee, my former advisor, and Professor Hong Bae Lee and Professor Young-Seok Kim. I should not forget to express my gratitude to my former colleagues at Sogang University’s Korean Language Education Center: just to name a few, Hyun Jeong Kim, Choon Hee Lee, and Sung Hee Kim. v Furthermore, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to fellow students at Georgetown for their friendship and/or help regarding judgments on Korean data: Yunkyoung Kang, Myong Hee Choi, Soojeong Um, Boram Suh, Eunji Lee, Bokyung Moon, Haein Park, Zie-eun Yang, Jung Yoon Choi, Sinae Lee, Chong Min Lee, Jamyung Goo, Yen-Tzu Chang, Rebecca Sachs and Mika Hama. My special thanks should go to Laura Siebecker, who patiently proofread my dissertation whenever I asked. My special thanks should go to my family. I’d first like to thank my mother-in-law for providing all kinds of support. My sister-in-law, Seong-Ok Park, and her husband, Seok-Jin Kim, have also constantly helped me and my husband. I am also grateful to my brother-in-law, Jong-Seok Park, for his various support. My elder sister, Kyung Hee Hwang, and hyengpu, Jaeheung Park, have been constant supporters. I’d also like to thank my younger brother, Sang Youp Hwang, for being my supporter throughout my studies. My heartful gratitude should go to my parents, Se Hun Hwang and Soon Hee Lee, for their endless love and support. Without them, I could not have completed my study in the US. They always trusted and encouraged me to finish my degree in the US. This dissertation is dedicated to them. Lastly, I am grateful to my husband, Jong Un Park, for his unlimited love and support. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction .....................................................................................................................1 1.1. Goals and claims................................................................................................................1 1.2. Theoretical background for the feature-reassembly approach ........................................6 1.2.1. Morphosyntactic features & parameters .................................................................6 1.2.2. Why is the feature-reassembly approach necessary for L2 acquisition? ..............10 1.3. Why is Korean plural marking appropriate for the feature-reassembly framework? .....14 1.4. Organization of the dissertation ....................................................................................15 Chapter 2 Korean intrinsic plural marking ....................................................................................18 2.1. Nominal Mapping Parameter & Borer (2005) ..............................................................19 2.1.1. Nominal Mapping Parameter ...............................................................................19 2.1.2. Borer (2005) .........................................................................................................23 2.2. Plural markers in classifier languages: are they true plural markers or not? ..................25 2.2.1. Chinese plural marker -men ..................................................................................25 2.2.2. Korean plural marker -tul .....................................................................................29 2.3. Syntactic and semantic properties of intrinsic -tul ........................................................35 2.3.1. Description of Korean intrinsic plural marking ....................................................35 2.3.2. Basic properties of intrinsic -tul: -tul vs. ø ...........................................................38 2.3.3. An additional meaning of -tul: Specificity ...........................................................42 2.3.4. Pluralized NPs in a demonstrative context ...........................................................48