From an L2 experimental perspective, the present paper aims at shedding new lights on the nature and the source of exhaustiveness in the two English constructions: (i) ‘it’-clefts; ‘only’-foci. We report experimental evidence that the cancellation of the exhaustiveness construal normally available to the constructions at issue gives rise to different processing costs. Specifically, we provide the results by comparing the ERP patterns that arise when the (marked) cancellation of exhaustiveness is processed in either ‘it’-clefts or ‘only’-foci. Our findings show that during on-line sentence processing, highly proficient Korean English leaners can discern the two different types of exhaustiveness, which in turn indicates that they can recruit different levels of linguistic structure.

The paper also offers a supplementary analysis of the two subtypes of the vague action verb, using the hybrid model of lexical conceptual structure and syntactic argument structure. This paper investigates the etiology of the contrast between Korean/Japanese (K/J) and Chinese in the availability of a quantificational/sloppy reading to the null subject. We attribute this contrast to the asymmetry between K/J and Chinese in the Case/topic marking system. K/J employs both overt subject/ object Case marker and topic marker, but Chinse does not have either of them. The latter language rather uses structural positions to code grammatical and topic relations. Though an object element in Chinese uses different positions (i.e., post-verbal and clause-intial positions) to indicate its grammatical relation and topichood, a subject element uses the same clause-initial position to do so. Thus, the element in clauseinitial position apparently regarded as a subject element is grammaticalized into taking up the marked role of a topic in this language. Mutatis mutandis, its null counterpart or null subject is only construed as a definite topic, which bars it from being interpreted with a quantificational/sloppy reading.