This case study investigated whether an experiment group of thirty-two Korean college students well corresponded to the height of back vowel /ɔ/, the lip-rounding of /ɒ/ and /ɑ/, and the vowel merging of cot - caught as the criteria for telling British from American English. This research finds its meaning in elucidating Korean college students’ perceptual gap or misconception in discriminating British English from American English within the boundary of English vowel height and roundness, and bring to light the possible background reasons. About the vowel /ɔ/, their judgement was seriously hurt because their perception of the vowel height was negatively influenced by non-linguistic factors like the preoccupation about a particular English. On the other hand, they well adopted and used the lip-rounding difference between /ɒ/ and /ɑ/ as a criterion. However, they failed to use the vowel merging of cot and caught as another criterion because most of the Korean students had not fully familiarized themselves with the vowel merging.

This paper looks at pro-form and cohesion in English writing from the angle of Korean L2 writers' mental script and attempts to suggest an interpretation of their responses in pro-form substitution. In English writing, to boost cohesion repetitive key nouns are typically substituted by pro-forms only if clarity is salvaged. However, how can we explain contrastive cases where Korean L2 writers prefer repetitive nouns to remain as they are without weakening the cohesion of a text? The writers attempt to explain this unsolved question, based on the survey results from Korean L2 writers and by referring to related theories of Oshima and Hogue (2006), Hyland (2009) and Hyun (2015). So far our research indicates that such response is attributable to Korean L2 writers' own schema and then this schema issue subsequently translates into their genre difference.

Vagueness is poison to metaphoric clarity. It frustrates interpreters' effort to decode the coiner's intended message. What causes such vagueness? Quite possibly, it is due to the arbitrary nature that a metaphor has; two disparate entities of focus and frame spin off vagueness throughout the whole metaphoric structure. Most probably, frameshift is an antidote to rid metaphors of thick vagueness. In that sense, extralinguistic information is a good building block for a frameshift. However, extralinguistic information does not always trigger a frameshift, nor does it bring vagueness to bright light. Then, the ball is handed over to the arbitrariness because it is the axis to which all other inexplicable metaphoric phenomena converge.

Resumptive pronouns in English are found in relative constructions where gaps are supposed to take the place. If a construction has two or more forms in free variation from the point of view of truth-conditional semantics, it is worthwhile investigating whether there are pragmatic differences. Based on Prince (1990, 1995)’s observations, we will show the pragmatic meaning difference between the gap-containing structure and the pronoun-containing structure. We will also show that the reconstruction based on movement theory does not suffice to explain the distribution. Then we will suggest that resumption is the last resort strategy at PF which needs reference-set computation against the suggestion of Aoun, Choueiri & Hornstein (2001) which is based on Binding. In the following chapter, many instances of resumptive pronouns will be presented, showing that there is not insignificant meaning difference between the gap-containing structure and the pronoun-containing structure. In chapter 2, the proposals of reconstruction will be critically surveyed. In chapter 3, the resumption as the last resort strategy will be suggested. Chapter 4 concludes the paper.