The present study investigates some problems with pedagogical English grammar and provides solutions to enhance the learnability of the pedagogical grammar, focusing on prepositions. In the pedagogical grammar books developed and used in Korea, a preposition or prepositional phrase is often treated as an adverb (phrase), adjective (phrase) or conjunction, depending on its function or distribution. This study points out that describing prepositions as differing categories in those materials is misleading, and such descriptions stem from the confusion of grammatical category and function, which is likely due to misunderstanding the two terms, “adverb” as a category and “adverbial” as a function from the traditional grammar (Quirk et. al. 1985). This study argues that those descriptions of prepositions are invalid pedagogically as well as linguistically, since they cause severe learnability problems. In order to solve these learnability problems, this study posits that the term from modern theoretical grammar, “adjunct”, should be adopted in the pedagogical grammar.

Auditory perceptual simulation (APS) reading is a virtual auditory representation of other speakers reading out a text. A previous L1 study showed that native speakers of English using APS reading read faster and more accurately. This study investigated whether using a similar paradigm can enhance L2 learners' weak syntactic processing with more salient prosodic information. In eye-tracking experiments, L2 Korean learners of English, with or without APS-manipulation, read experimental sentences that employed the plausibility effect, such as The cat that the mouse chased was fast. The plausibility effect would occur when the participants properly established the structural relation and disappear when they overcame the difficulty with accurate syntactic interpretations. The results demonstrated that the APS-reading group showed larger plausibility effect at the critical region during the initial processing, but smaller plausibility effect during the late processing. The APS group detected the implausibility of the sentence earlier than the control group and had less difficulty accurately parsing the structure. This finding suggests that APS reading can improve L2 learners' syntactic processing, as it does in L1 processing, by facilitating their prosodic representations.

Fragment answers may form complex phrases within which an answer to the wh-correlate is embedded. Such fragments are dubbed “pied-piping” fragments, and the previous research observed that there is an asymmetry in deletion within the pied-piping fragment with respect to its position. While deletion is possible when the pied-piping fragment appears in final position, it is impossible when the fragment appears in non-final positions. To account for the asymmetry, two important factors have been addressed in the current research. Departing from the standard focus projection rules, the research follows a revised version of focus projection rules (Buring 2006, Chung 2015), in that external arguments or adjuncts may project up to the phrase that dominates them. This explains that the pied-piping fragment can receive [F]-marking and undergo focus-movement. In addition, scattered deletions are argued to be prohibited; two independent instances of ellipsis cannot be licensed within a sentence (Park 2016). Assuming that scattered deletions are generally banned in ellipsis contexts, the asymmetry is reduced to the difference in the timing of focus clustering. In final position the pied-piping fragment forms focus cluster with a higher [F]-marked fragment within VPs, so that nothing prevents it from undergoing focus movement. On the other hand, in non-final positions, the fragments form focus cluster in SpecFocP and necessarily fall into LF-intervention effects.

This paper analyzes a conditional and unconditional presupposition of conditional sentences in terms of possible worlds semantics. Some theorists have opposed a widely accepted view that conditionals have a conditional presupposition, and claimed that a conditional presupposition is too weak. A few strengthening mechanisms for conditional presupposition have been proposed based on independence and the assumption that conditionals are a material implication. However, not only did the assumption turn out to be problematic, but also such approaches yield a wrong prediction. The analysis sought in this paper accounts for presupposition projection in terms of possible worlds without assuming that conditionals are a material implication. Both conditional and unconditional presuppositions of conditionals are accounted for without such issues previously raised.

This paper suggests annotation guidelines to build a Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank for Korean. We discuss the part-of-speech annotation of Korean specific-categories such as prenouns, numeral classifiers, and (pre)final endings, and propose how to implement UD scheme in Korean regarding selecting a head and assigning dependency relations to dependents. UD prioritizes content words over functional words since the former exhibits less cross-linguistic variations. In a noun phrase, for instance, a core noun is always a head of the entire noun phrase independently of a language. The rest are treated as a dependent: not only a modifier such as an adjective but also a functional category such as an article, numeral quantifier, demonstrative, and so on. However, when it comes to head-less constructions such as coordination or predicate ellipsis, UD firmly advocates the head-initial strategy. The present application of UD to Korean tries to follow UD's principles as much as possible. Korean is a head-final language, so that headed constructions are analyzed head-finally. In contrast, head-less ones are tagged head-initially. This might disregard language-specific characteristics from a linguistic perspective, but the strategy allows us to build up a set of treebanks in a cross-linguistically consistent way (i.e., the fundamental purpose of UD).