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.

This paper investigates three types of dative-marking causative verbs in Korean: caused motion verbs, adversative passive verbs, and periphrastic causative verbs that unmarkedly select for dativeparticled NP. Caused motion verbs arguably entertain lexically-introduced causative features, adversative passives involve lexico-syntactically oriented causative and passive morpheme(s), periphrastic causative verbs involve a syntactically active causative component. We examined the processing aspects of these three types of verbs, adopting the event-related potential (ERP) paradigm of superior temporal resolution. We crucially employed the dative/ ACC alternation well-known in Korean syntax to come up with the potentially anomalous or marked experimental conditions. The results are: motion verbs and adversative passive verbs with ACC NP, relative to ones with DAT NP, recorded the bi-phasic ERP components: N400 and reduced P600. On the other hand, periphrastic causative verbs with ACC NP, compared to ones with DAT NP, registered only reduced P600. Taken together, only the syntactically-active causative component licences the ACC Case on the NP whose dative particle is dropped. Motion verbs and adversative passive verbs are taken to fail to complete semantic integration with the preceding ACC NP, therefore attempting to undergo syntactic reanalysis.

This paper aims to investigate Korean advanced L2 English learners’ strategies for ellipsis resolution during sentence processing. Ellipsis resolution is known to involve several stages of information processing from the initial step of detecting an ellipsis-licensing element by the parser to the final stage of integrating the ellipsis site with the information retrieved from the antecedent of the ellipsis site. In examining these steps, we have manipulated three factors: (i) TP vs. VP-ellipsis; (ii) two types of discourse coherence relations (resemblance(-contrast) vs. cause-effect relations); (iii) voice match vs. mismatch. We found through the ERP recordings that voice mismatch in TP ellipsis elicited N400, followed by P600, irrespective of discourse coherence relations. In contrast, voice mismatch in VP-ellipsis registered N400 only in resemblance(-contrast) relation, but not in cause-effect relation. These findings lead us to conclude that Korean advanced L2 learners of English seem to undergo the full sequence of processing stages required for ellipsis resolution.