This study tested whether the pronunciation of English vowels could improve through the explicit instruction based on the articulatory and auditory characteristics of English vowels, even during the pandemic, when oral practice was restricted. 30 university students who took an English pronunciation course participated in the study as the experimental group and they were taught English vowels with articulatory and auditory training. The 21 students in the control group listened to target sentences recorded by a native English speaker in an English listening and speaking course. At the beginning and at the end of the semester, the participants in both groups recorded 18 English sentences, four of which ([i], [ɪ], [ε], and [æ]) were acoustically analyzed. As Korean learners of English are known to have difficulties distinguishing those front vowels ([i] vs. [ɪ] and [ε] vs. [æ]), the F1 differences in each of those vowel pairs were statistically analyzed. The results showed that only female students belonging to the experimental group marked a marginally meaningful improvement in the vowel pair of [ε] and [æ]. The author concludes that it is possible to partially enhance the English vowel pronunciations of Korean students through implicit listening and explicit articulatory training. Teaching methods to improve students' pronunciation are suggested.

The goal of this paper is to identify the distributional characteristics in the frequency of Korean and English number words through quantitatively analyzing their frequency data. The frequency distributions of number words were visualized and the correlation between the magnitude of numbers and the frequency of number words were measured through Spearman's and Kendall's correlation coefficients because the frequency distributions of number words did not follow the normal distribution. This paper shows that the main cross-linguistic characteristics in the frequency of number words, which were reported in Dehaene & Mehler (1992) and Jansen & Pollmann (2001), are also observed in Korean and English: the smaller the number, the more frequent the number words and the local increase effect of reference numbers on the frequency distributions. However, this paper additionally shows that the language-particular number system also affects the frequency distributions of number words.

This paper aims to research Negative Polarity Items 'tong' and 'yeong' from the perspective of Korean language education. The analysis is done from three aspects: previous research, dictionary, and corpus. First of all, previous research revealed that different researchers have different opinions on the Syntagmatic Relation between 'tong' and 'yeong'. Besides, some problems occurred when vocabulary learning orders were set for Korean learners and no applicable scheme was put forward for Korean language education. Second, the analysis of dictionaries shows that 'tong' and 'yeong' are synonyms, which explains why Korean learners may find it difficult to distinguish them. Moreover the four dictionaries analyzed in this paper did not provide detailed word meanings, syntagmatic relation, and samples. Finally, actual usages of Korean native speakers are analyzed in an objective way and samples from a corpus are also explored. Generally speaking, 'yeong' is used more frequently, which indicates that native Korean speakers use 'yeong' more widely. Specifically speaking, 'tong' is often used in negative sentences while 'yeong' does not show much difference in its usage frequency in negative and positive sentences. This paper also shows that 'tong' and 'yeong' show a tendency of respective combination in sentences, which is explained in detail.

Examining two non-standard sentence endings in Korean, we make an observation about the ulkkayo? form and make a case for a grammaticalization process for the silkeyyo form that provides a more intuitive explanation than in previous studies. An emerging non-standard use of the ulkkayo? form involves questions about something the listener must have direct access to, such as his or her own current state of mind or the number of his or her children, whereas the modality of the ulkkayo? form only describes a conjecture or surmise. It is illustrated that its anomaly derives from an incompatibility between questioned topics and the weak modal force of the form. The other non-standard sentence ending, the silkeyyo form, is an odd combination of the honorific marker si and ulkeyyo, the first person sentence ending, because rules prohibit self-honorification. It is hypothesized that this is the result of a grammaticalization process where a speaker utters the listener's expected answer, thereby shortening a conversational exchange in a hectic customer-service interaction. It is observed that the emergence of these non-standard forms reflects a society where politeness in the public sphere remains a high priority. Even when time efficiency forces a grammaticalization, it appears that a considerable effort is exerted to preserve a high level of politeness.

This paper aims to investigate the focus domain expansion phenomenon in the Korean delimiter '-do' construction. For this, Chung(2021)'s oblique merge analysis is critically reviewed, the main idea of which is that thematic elements of a verb are formed as a complex focus cluster via the oblique merge operation in overt syntax. I point out that potential problems arise from the oblique merge operation itself, including binding, c-command, case licensing, and adverb interruption. I argue that the problems with Chung's oblique merge analysis are fundamentally caused by the systematic limit under the presupposed head-final structure for Korean. As an alternative, I propose that under the head-initial structure for Korean, the focus complex elements in question can be derived by raising the Del(imiter)P to the focus element, or a chain can be formed between the focus element and the DelP by the movement of the null operator of '-do,' in either case by QR at LF.

The purpose of this study is to describe the conceptual metaphor of problem-solving in American English and to analyze its use based on the COCA corpus. Since the puzzle metaphor was explained as a characteristic problem-solving metaphor of American culture in Lakoff and Johnson (1980), no detailed linguistic research has followed. In this study, we reveal that there are two prevalent types of conceptualizations of PROBLEM and PROBLEMSOLVING in English: PROBLEM is a given task such as a puzzle, and PROBLEMSOLVING is fulfilling the task by finding the correct answer; PROBLEM is a danger, and PROBLEM-SOLVING is eliminating the danger with or without the correct answer. In the first type of metaphors, there emerges an entailment that the correct answer is in the problem itself, not in the outside environment. Analyzing the use of metaphors reveals that the machine breakdown metaphor and the disease metaphor are major alternative metaphors to the puzzle metaphor. The two metaphors ask us to find the correct answer before eliminating a danger, showing that, in American culture, finding the correct answer is crucial in problem-solving regardless of how a problem is conceived.

The paper seeks to provide a syntactic and pragmatic account for the Contrastive Stripping Construction (CSC) in English. The pragmatic account will give a full support for our syntactic analysis. The issue here is on how to generate the CSC with a subordinate conjunction and how to give a right contrastive interpretation. Pointing out the problems of the Movement-Ellipsis analysis, we propose a construction-based analysis of the CSC, which interacts the English CSC rule with the lexical information on the lexemes such as though, except and whereas. It gives us a simple explanation on how to produce the CSCs with a subordinating conjunction and assign an appropriate contrastive interpretation to them.

This paper constitutes an initial part of the research agenda that aims to explore the relationship between individuals' multicultural sensitivity and their acquisition of a second language (L2). In order to lay the groundwork for a systematic inquiry into this complex problem, the present study first reviews previous works on theoretical and empirical validation of the construct of cultural sensitivity. The affective, cognitive, and behavioral correlates of cultural sensitivity that have been identified and discussed in the literature are recapitulated from a perspective of L2 research. Secondly, drawing on a pool of extant instruments to measure individuals' cultural sensitivity, we develop an alternative scale that better fits the goal of subsequent research efforts to investigate the role of cultural sensitivity in L2 acquisition. Lastly, we put forward some research questions that can be tackled effectively by means of the instrument developed here in the context of learning and teaching English as a foreign language.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the reflexive-antecedent dependency resolution accompanying the wh-filler-gap dependency resolution in neural network language models (LMs)' sentence processing, comparing the processing result of LMs to the one of humans. To do so, we adopt the psycholinguistic methodology that Fraizer et al. (2015) used for humans. The neural-network language models employed in this study are four LMs: the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) trained on large datasets, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2) trained on large datasets, an LSTM trained on small datasets (L2 datasets), and the GPT-2 trained on small datasets (L2 datasets). We found that only the LMs trained on large datasets were sensitive to the dependency between a reflexive and its antecedent matching in gender, but all of the four neural LMs failed to learn reflexive-antecedent dependency accompanying wh-filler-gap dependency. Furthermore, we also found that the neural LMs have a learning bias in gender mismatch.

This study explores how academic authors of different fields present themselves in the text and how they build up authorial identities with rhetorical functions of authorial referential expressions. The corpus for this study is comprised of 72 research articles (RAs) written in English in the areas of mathematics and linguistics. The frequency of authorial referential expressions was analyzed statistically and their rhetorical functions were also investigated qualitatively, based on Hyland's (2002) classifications. The results report the significant overuse of first-person plural pronouns in the corpus of mathematics although the corpus consists of all single-authored RAs. Meanwhile, various types of authorial referential markers are used in the corpus of linguistics. Also, authors of linguistics select more diverse rhetorical functions than the ones of mathematics. We can say that a discipline influences the choice of authorial referential markers more significantly than a language. The study ends with suggestions that EAP learners and RA authors should be more aware of authorial reference and their rhetorical functions.