Null Arguments in a Korean EFL Students Interlanguage: A Case Study

Abstract

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.