Linguistic complexity and information structure in Korean: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading☆

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded complement sentences; the third experiment additionally examined reading of sentences with object-modifying, object-extracted relative clauses. In Korean, both of these structures place two NPs with nominative case marking early in the sentence, with the embedded and matrix verbs following later. The type (pronoun, name or description) of these two critical NPs was varied in the experiments. When the initial NPs were of the same type, comprehension was slowed after participants had read the sentence-final verbs, a finding that supports the view that working memory in language comprehension is constrained by similarity-based interference during the retrieval of information necessary to determine the syntactic or semantic relations between noun phrases and verb phrases. Ease of comprehension was also influenced by the association between type of NP and syntactic position, with the best performance being observed when more definite NPs (pronouns and names) were in a prominent syntactic position (e.g., matrix subject) and less definite NPs (descriptions) were in a non-prominent syntactic position (embedded subject). This pattern provides evidence that the interpretation of sentences is facilitated by consistent packaging of information in different linguistic elements

A Generalized Framework for Video Instance Segmentation

The handling of long videos with complex and occluded sequences has recently emerged as a new challenge in the video instance segmentation (VIS) community. However, existing methods have limitations in addressing this challenge. We argue that the biggest bottleneck in current approaches is the discrepancy between training and inference. To effectively bridge this gap, we propose a Generalized framework for VIS, namely GenVIS, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks without designing complicated architectures or requiring extra post-processing. The key contribution of GenVIS is the learning strategy, which includes a query-based training pipeline for sequential learning with a novel target label assignment. Additionally, we introduce a memory that effectively acquires information from previous states. Thanks to the new perspective, which focuses on building relationships between separate frames or clips, GenVIS can be flexibly executed in both online and semi-online manner. We evaluate our approach on popular VIS benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS). Notably, we greatly outperform the state-of-the-art on the long VIS benchmark (OVIS), improving 5.6 AP with ResNet-50 backbone. Code is available at https://github.com/miranheo/GenVIS.Comment: CVPR 202

Optimization in Argument Expression and Interpretation: A Unified Approach

This dissertation investigates fixed word order phenomena in 'free' word order languages and their consequences for linguistic theory. Ashas long been observed, languages with flexible word order, in certain circumstances, show 'freezing' effects, whereby only a canonical word order is possible. I propose new generalizations to explain the two types of freezing effects, namely markedness reduction in marked grammatical contexts and the emergence of the unmarked, and show that these pervasive patterns of markedness are incompatible with the classical conception of grammar within generative linguistics where principles of universal grammar (UG) are both universal and inviolable. The analysis I develop here, set within the framework of Optimality-theoretic Lexical-Functional Grammar, captures the universal basis of word order freezing and its parallels to markedness reduction and emergence of the unmarked effects observed in other systems for argument expressions and in other components of grammar,while at the same time allowing for crosslinguistic variation. The first part of the dissertation shows how the Optimality-theoretic account, based on the interaction between markedness constraints derived through harmonic alignment of prominence hierarchies and other constraints on word order, naturally captures the pattern of universal markedness and the basic generalization that highly marked argument types occur only in unmarked position in Hindi and Korean: in these two languages, noncanonical orderings are preferred options for marking a special information structure. However, in the special case of prominence mismatch, they are replaced by the less marked, canonical order. This is due to the ranking in which the markedness constraints banning marked argument types in the marked positions dominate the information structuring constraints which favor realization of contrasting discourse prominence of arguments. Beyond providing a specific analysis for the freezing effects in Hindi and Korean, I show how the constraint system I develop can be employed to explain markedness reduction in the systems of contrast in other domains of morphosyntax. In the second part, the model is extended to comprehension as well as production, demonstrating further advantages of the optimization-based approach to argument expression. It is shown that by defining grammaticality in terms of bidirectional optimization, we can account for the word order freezing effect as the emergence of the unmarked incomprehension grammar, in terms of the same set of markedness and faithfulness constraints that are independently motivated for a production-based optimization account of case patterns and constituent ordering. Along with other optimization-based approaches to morphosyntax, the present study contributes solid evidence for fundamental structural parallels between phonology and syntax, and raises questions whether the arbitrary separation of linguistic phenomena and performance-related phenomena has any systematic theoretical and empirical significance.Ph.D

A Critical Evaluation of the Translation of Japanese Literature in Korea

The translation of Japanese literature in Korea did not receive much attention during both the transitional era to the modern world and the Japanese colonial era. During this time most works of literature were simply adapted, but not translated. The anti-Japanese policy of the Rhee Syngman Government caused the translation of Japanese literature to be neglected in the period between Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule and the 1960s. In subsequent years, a substantial number of complete works, selections, and novel sequences were translated in different forms between the time of the 4.19 Revolution and the 1980s. Most of these translations were introduced in support of the policy of ‘knowing Japan’. The translations of the work of Murakami Haruki greatly influenced Korean literature in the 1990s. Moreover, during the planning stages of the translation of the complete works of Kenzaburō Ōe, an author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, translations were required to promote ‘cultural exchange’ between Korea and Japan as well as an ‘understanding of Japan’. However, the translation of works by Murakami Haruki, including his lengthy detective novels, was more likely driven by consumption, rather than by a desire to promote cultural exchange. The complete works of individual authors such as Dazai Osamu, Soseki Natsume and Ryunosuke Akutagawa have been translated since 2005. Moreover, most of the main classical works of literature have also been translated. It can therefore be said that the translation of Japanese literature has been enjoying its golden age. These efforts have led to the consumption of many different translated works of Japanese literature in Korea. However, the critical literary evaluation of translated works is still in its infancy and has mainly focused on drawing attention to errors in translation and mistranslation. In fact, the level of evaluation has not exceeded the result of a study, ‘The Status and Analysis of 60 Years of Japanese Literature Translation’. Of late, the evaluation of literary translation in Korea has been moving in the direction of translational criticism; hence, the study of literary translation has reached a new turning point. With these developments in mind, a study of the translation of Japanese literature was conducted from multiple perspectives and evaluated against translational theories with the aim of extending the scope of Japanese studies

Markedness and Pronoun Incorporation

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Aspect (2000

Iconicity and Variation in the Choice of Object Forms in Korean

The naturalness with which case ellipsis occurs in certain environments in Korean has been attributed to the information status and markedness of arguments, although few studies have compared the two factors explicitly. Through experimentation, the present study demonstrates that both factors simultaneously and independently influence object case ellipsis. The present study also provides a possible explanation of why case-marked and case-ellipsed objects are distributed the way they are by going beyond the mere descriptive level and looking at how the choice between the two variants is motivated by extra-linguistic, cognitive factors. In particular, we argue that the factors of focus, animacy, and definiteness can be linked to an iconic principle, which predicts the correlation between conceptual markedness and structural markedness. This general prediction is shown to be confirmed by the results of the experiment as well as corpus analyses.This research was supported by the research grant from Sungkyunkwan University (2005-0695-000

Input-output mismatches in OT

Bidirectional Optimality Theory allows us to see a wide range of problems which would previously have been considered unrelated from a new perspective, the perspective of asymmetric relationships between input and output. For interpretation, the input is a form and the output a meaning, and for production th