Discourse Marker mwe in the Interlanguage of Chinese Learners of Korean*

Park, Hyeson. 2012. Discourse Marker mwe in the Interlanguage of Chinese Learners of Korean. Linguistic Research 29(1), 235-260. This study explores the development and use of mwe, a multi-functional discourse marker, in the interlanguage of Chinese learners of L2 Korean. Oral production data elicited from 28 Chinese migrant workers at three proficiency levels and five advanced Chinese students were analyzed focusing on the distribution of mwe in three functional domains, which consist of nine subcategories. A native corpus of about 56,000 words compiled from the Sejong Corpus served as the native baseline. The data analysis revealed the following: 1) Few tokens of mwe were produced by the migrant workers until they reached the advanced level. 2) The nine functions of mwe were used by the advanced learners, mostly as a filler, an uncertainty marker, and an exemplifier. 3) The Chinese students with about half the length of residence of the workers exhibited as diverse uses of mwe as the workers, implying the facilitative role of formal instruction in the acquisition of discourse markers. (Keimyung University) 1

Child second language acquisition and grammatical theories: The Minimalist Program and optimality theory

The aim of linguistic theory is to explain what knowledge of language consists of and how this knowledge is acquired. Generative linguistics, which had set out to achieve this goal, has recently seen the development of two main approaches to Universal Grammar (UG). One is the Minimalist Program (MP) and the other is Optimality Theory (OT). In the MP framework, language is claimed to be acquired through parameter setting, while in OT language acquisition is viewed as a constraint reranking process. In this study, I compare the two evolving linguistic theories in relation to child L2 acquisition phenomena; that is, how and whether the two different approaches to UG could be used to account for language development in real time. The database for this study was a corpus of natural and elicited-interview speech collected by the National Center for Bilingual Research from six Korean children learning English as an L2 in a bilingual education school program. Two constructions, null arguments and wh-questions produced by the Korean children in their developing L2 English, were chosen for in-depth investigation. The data analysis shows that (1) the children dropped few subjects from the early stages, (2) the children dropped more objects than subjects, (3) the children did not apply subject-verb inversion in why -questions, and (4) of the wh-questions, when-questions were one of the last to appear in the children's developing English. It was examined whether these four findings could be explained within the MP and the OT frameworks. The MP and OT in their present forms, however, do not seem to be able to fully account for the data. I have proposed some adaptations of the theories and explored plausible explanations. The overall picture emerging from the study is that the gradual nature of language development can best be explained as being a result of the incremental acquisition of the lexicon. The relationship between linguistic theory and acquisition studies, especially second language acquisition studies, has been unidirectional, from theory to acquisition (SLA) studies. It is to be hoped that this study may contribute to connecting the gap between linguistic theory and SLA studies, and making their relationship more bidirectional

Why-questions in L2 Acquisition

It has been observed that children learning English as their Ll or 12 apply subject-auxiliary inversion or do insertion (S-Aux inversion) gradually in wh-questions beginning with argumental wh-questions and spreading to adjunct wh-questions. The application of S-Aux inversion was found to appear last in why-questions. This paper attempts to account for the delayed S-Aux inversion in why-questions. The analysis will show that morphological characteristics of why are responsible for the late S-Aux inversion found in developing grammars of English as an L1 and L2

The promise of english: Linguistic capital and the neoliberal worker in the South Korean job market

10.1080/13670050.2011.573067International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism144443-45