This study considers the criteria of genitive alternation in English, i.e. the alternation between s- and of- genitive cases, in a unified approach under a single criterion. The factors that are believed to influence the choice between the two types of genitives include animacy, topicality, syntactic weight, a final sibilant in the possessor, etc. Those factors interact with each other complicatedly in the choice between the two types of genitive constructions, and some overlaps among them exist implicitly. This paper suggests that the overlapped factor is the ‘efficiency’ in the speaker’s information delivery in language use. We can get an economic result if the multiple allegedly working criteria for the choice between the genitive case constructions are replaced by the single factor ‘efficiency.’

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the empirical adequacy of the event-based language typology with special reference to English and Korean. The event-based language typology classifies languages into I- and D-languages based on the importance of the initial and terminal bounds of an event with respects to the way the relevant languages use in the recognition of eventiveness. In I-languages, in which the initial bound of an event is important, activity and accomplishment are recognized as events, while in D-languages, where the terminal bound of an event is important, achievement and accomplishment are so recognized. English and Korean, the target languages of this study, show the characteristics of I- and D-languages respectively. In the case of English, we can confirm that it falls into D-languages based on the fact (1) that event cancellation is impossible and (2) that causative reading is possible in terms of the delimitation of predicates. In the case of Korean, we can tell that it belongs to I-languages as (3) event cancellation is possible and (4) only NPs that can work as an initiator can be the subject in the position of [Spec, FP-init].

This paper aims to examine problematic areas in assessing children’s language learning, suggesting key solutions to the problems arising from different types of assessment. A critical evaluation of a variety of alternative assessment methods provided several teaching implications. First, assessment needs to be conducted through informal tests in which the learners cannot notice that they are being assessed. Although assessing young learners needs to be compatible with the more accessible learning such as activities used everyday in their classroom, coping with instructions for classroom activities needs to be handled with care. Assessing young learners through group or pair works can be more effective to enhance social and communicational skills than traditional tests. However, equity in relation to their participation in the activities, their English knowledge, and learning experience needs to be taken into serious consideration. Finally, more attempts to promote teacher-student interaction through student journals and conferencing assessment need to be made, even though this would not be culturally preferred learning style in Korea. This paper may thus give solutions for effective ways of assessing young learners from multiple perspectives rather than depending on only one assessment instrument.

This paper aims to explore the problematic nature of the use of adverbial connectors employed in NNS and NS academic essays by using two different corpora from Korean university students and from English native speakers in the UK. Combining corpus-based and discourse analytic approaches, the study focuses on the frequency and distributions of adverbial connectors, thus investigating in what ways this can affect the rhetorical features in terms of the text cohesion and structure. The results indicate that the Korean sample students shared the problem of other L2 writers with the overuse of overall connectors, but they showed a strong preference for using colloquial and spoken forms of adverbial connectors. On semantic relations, the overuse problem occurred in the listing, in particular, reinforcing types of the adverbial connectors. The noteworthy difference is that the mechanical repetitions of listing and contrasting ideas, and connecting them in a cause-effect sequence was identified more frequently in the Korean student texts than in the native student ones. However, counter-argument is more preferred in the argumentative context of the native student texts with more overt use of contrastive connecting items. Finally, most of the misused connectors were identified to simply repeat the ideas in the same viewpoint, which may have led to a failure in developing logical sequences in argumentative discourse. Another misuse type of connectors may derive from sociopragmatic transfer from L1 to L2. The findings thus may give some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise culture-specific register awareness and understand the different semantic types of adverbial connectors.

The appropriate use of hedged expressions is particularly a problematic feature of non-native writers' English academic writings. This study analyses the features of hedging in NNS and NS academic essays by using two different corpora from Korean masters' students and from English native speakers in the UK. This corpus-based study focuses on the types and frequencies of epistemic devices, examining the salient features of hedging used in the Korean L2 writings. The results from both frequency and contextual analysis indicate that they rely heavily on using modal verbs and other certainty markers of adverbs, and this led to stronger and direct statements. Along with their serious confusion with impersonalized or personalized forms in relation to the usage of lexical verbs, they showed a strong preference for giving personal involvement, which occurred in specific patterns of personalized devices in conversational hedges. These patterns can be partly explained by the cultural transfer from L1 to L2 as well as lack of linguistic knowledge across different genres. The findings thus can contribute to giving some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise both culture and genre-specific awareness in the areas of second language pragmatics.