L1 Influence on L2 Learning of English Resultative Constructions: The Syntactic and Semantic Structure of Korean Students' Interlanguage

Abstract

The present study explores the syntactic and semantic structures of the resultative construction, with special reference to English and Korean. It also investigates native Korean-speaking English learners comprehension and production of English resultative constructions (RC, hereafter). Resultative constructions show considerable variations across languages (Eckardt, 2003

Legendre, 1997

Nakazawa, 2008

Napoli, 1992). English and Korean provide a case in point. English resultatives have been analyzed as complements denoting telic events (Goldberg, 1995

Kearns, 2007). The present study shows that one of the most representative resultative phrases in Korean, AP-key phrase, is best analyzed as an adjunct that can denote atelic sense. Two experimental studies were undertaken to investigate Korean students comprehension and production of English resultative constructions. Study I (Comprehension Test) comprised an acceptability judgment task (AJT) and an elicited choice task (ECT), in which 99 Korean students and 17 native English speakers (NSs) participated. Study II (Production Test) was an elicited writing task (EWT), in which 97 Korean students participated. The results of the AJT showed that the Korean students comprehension of the target construction was significantly lower than that of the NSs. In contrast to the NS group, both high and low proficiency Korean learner groups failed to accept the grammatical RCs and failed to reject the syntactically and semantically ungrammatical RCs. The ECT results showed an asymmetry in preferences for English RCs between the Korean learner groups and the NS control group. The NSs showed significantly higher preferences for English RCs than the two Korean learner groups. Given a choice, the learners preferred adjunct expressions over RCs. This result was expected based on the assumption that the L1 Korean resultative construction, which is an adjunct, would influence the learners L2 behavior. In the EWT, the Korean participants produced non-target-like sentences, using adjunct-type resultative phrases. This error also seems to result from L1 influence on the learning of L2 RCs, which has been observed in previous acquisition studies (Slabakova, 2002

Whong-Barr, 2005). In a nutshell, resultative constructions in English and Korean differ syntactically and semantically, and the Korean students comprehension and production of English resultative constructions were heavily influenced by their L1. Hence, due consideration needs to be given to developing systematic and efficient ways to help Korean students learn English RCs.