This paper investigated the be-insertion phenomenon in L2 English. L2 learners often insert be-forms before thematic verbs, creating nontargetlike forms (e.g. She is love icecream). Based on L2 data from learners of topic-prominent L1s, a group of researchers have claimed that such be-forms are topic markers transferred from the L1s. As L1 transfer cannot be supported without comparing different L2 groups, however, this study examined the explanatory adequacy of the Topic Marker Hypothesis by comparing the Korean and Russian EFL learners at different proficiency levels. Their oral production and grammaticality judgment suggests that regardless of the L1, be-forms could mark topics in the early stages of interlanguage, supporting full access to UG. Due to L1 transfer, however, be-insertion by the Korean group was more relevant to topic marking while that of the Russian group was more relevant to encoding agreement. These findings show complicated interplay between L1 transfer and UG.

This paper investigates whether there is a correlation between the development of agreement and the unlearning of null subjects and also how the null subjects of Korean EFL learners’ interlanguage are represented in topic-bound positions. The results of this study show that the unlearning of null subjects does not necessarily help the development of the third person singular morpheme like previously put forth by pro-drop analysis, which disconfirms the long-lived belief, MUH (Morphological Uniformity Hypothesis). On the contrary, the results also show that the positions of null arguments actually conform to the positions of topic-bound positions, which leads to the suggestion of the topic-drop analysis of null subjects.

This paper investigates how an intermediate Korean learner of English uses overt and null pronouns in writing short essays and also whether topic-prominent properties of the first language transfer to and affect the interlanguage. The results of this case study show that this learner was able to provide overt subjects and objects with relative ease, which is consistent with the previous study by Hwang (2005), but that he is somehow still under the influence of the L1 topic-prominent features. The unlearning of topic-prominence seems to be a lengthy process, during which L2 learners utilize some strategies based on surface form in order to avoid producing ungrammatical sentences.

이 연구의 목적은 지각 변동을 학습하는 과정에서 나타나는 중학생들의 중간 언어의 유형을 도출하는 것이다. 서울의 한 중학교 2학년 2학급에서 18명의 학생들을 선정하였다. 각 학생들은 총 네 차례에 걸쳐 개별 면담을 실시하였으며, 수집된 자료는 의미 관계와 주제 구조를 중심으로 분석되었다. 연구 결과, 일상 언어를 자원으로 하는 경우, 과학 어휘와 일상 어휘를 병용하는 경우, 그리고 과학 언어를 활용하지만 불충분한 경우와 의미 관계가 부적절한 경우를 합하여 총 8개의 중간 언어 유형이 도출되고 서술되었으며, 이를 바탕으로 조사된 중간언어의 함의를 토의하였다.

The description of the nature of Korean - Chinese interlanguage is a very useful way to understand the situation and characteristic of Chinese learning by Korean learner. Korean ？ Chinese interlanguage represents linguistic characteristic of Korean learner, which is related to the various elements of mother tongue (Korean) and Chinese learning of learners. In the aspects of pronunciation, the most remarkable characteristic of Korean learner is a pronunciation that is mainly focused on segments, which is closely related to the fact that Korean is not a tone language. Korean elements are mixed in the rule of sound change and pronunciation of partial consonants and vowels. In the aspects of vocabulary, its systematic character is relatively weak but it has characteristic coming from Korean. Some are substituted by Korean words, some are Korean way in meaning and function and some are due to the complexity of Chinese words. In the aspects of grammar, interlingual interference is negative transfer that is caused by the rule of word arrangement in the Korean sentence which has elements like object and complement etc. The interlingual interference results from the syntactical complexity of Chinese elements like complement, liheci (？合？), cunxianju (存？句) and so on.

Yun, Sung Kyu & Jung, Woo-hyun. 2004. Request and Question Perspective in Interlanguage Pragmatics. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 12(2). This paper is an interlanguage pragmatic study of request and question perspective. It aims to explore whether there are any differences in request perspective between American English native speakers and Korean EFL learners. To this end, this study employed a Discourse Completion Test, which consisted of eight situations. Data were collected from three different groups: native speakers of English; Korean learners of English; native speakers of Korean. The results showed that the learners deviated from native pragmatic norms in the choice of perspective in a relatively systematic way. The same held even more obviously in the use of please in interacting with request perspective. It was also shown that the mismatch between the native and nonnative groups in perspective was an instance of pragmatic transfer. The results suggested that the notions of imposition and politeness operated differently in perspective between the native and nonnative groups. It is expected that this study will shed light on the phenomenon of interlanguage pragmatics and the aspect of pragmatic transfer, revealing how learners differ from native speakers with respect to request perspective and what causes the differences.

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.