The present study addresses a learnability problem in the acquisition of English progressive aspect by Korean learners of English. As Korean and English differ in the way that the lexical aspect of verbs interacts with progressive morphology, we predicted that Korean learners of English would be affected by their L1 aspectual system, accepting non-targetlike combinations of lexical aspect and aspectual morphology. Sixty Korean university students were presented with sentences containing different aspectual classes of verbs in two conditions—the progressive and the simple present—and were asked to judge the naturalness of the sentences. The results showed that the majority of the learners erroneously accepted progressive sentences containing stative verbs. It also showed that the learners accepted simple present constructions containing eventitive verbs for an ongoing interpretation,indicating the pervasiveness of L1 transfer. The findings strongly suggest that Korean EFL learners have difficulty ruling out erroneous form-meaning associations based on their L1 progressive morphology.

The current research aims to show that a transitive predicate/verb in one language may not necessarily be transitive in another. An alternative argument structure, Alternative Argument Structure Hypothesis (AASH), is proposed and advocated in this paper in order to account for erroneous production patterns noted and observed in Kim (2001), Park (2013), and Hong (2015a, b). Korean L1ers learning English as an L2 insert illicit prepositions between an English transitive V such as ‘marry’,‘kiss’,‘answer’etc. and its complement, yielding fairly high inaccuracy. It is argued that the erroneous patterns may be attributed to the asymmetries in the lexical argument structures between the Korean Vs and its English counterparts. The Korean counterparts of these English Vs are of the Sino-Korean origin light verbs (Han and Rambow, 2000, Choi and Wechsler 2002, Bak 2011) accompany‘-hata’. Under this proposal, it is the argument structure rather than morphological case as Montrul (1997, 2000), Ahn (2013), and Brown and Iwasaki (2013) have argued for that transfers to the acquiring process of the transitivity of the English Vs by Korean L1ers. The ramification of this study is that L1 grammar of argument structure transfers to L2 acquisition more fully and noticeably than has been assumed in the literature.