The current paper aims to identify the semantico-pragmatic role of the adverb wancen in Korean. Rather than treating wancen as a typical degree modifier, we propose the novel role of wancen as an illocutionary intensifier in this paper. Specifically, we suggest the core properties of wancen as follows: First, unlike the usual degree intensifiers, the illocutionary intensifier wancen targets a scale in the speaker's epistemic attitude towards the proposition. By using wancen, the illocutionary effect of assertion can be maximally strengthened. Second, wancen gives rise to a pragmatic intensification effect by means of a subjective speaker-oriented adverb as a weak PPI (Ernst, 2009). The theoretical implication of the current study is to provide a widened view of cross-linguistic variation to cases where the intensifier does not necessarily have a lexical degree modifier, and languages parameterize the semantics and pragmatics of their illocutionary intensifier. (Chungnam National University)

The current study aims to explore the effect of neologism usage on interpersonal communication, especially between students and instructors. A survey was conducted with 154 university students. The results show that the majority of students use neologisms very often, especially in text communication. The respondents feel intimacy when professors use newly coined words for communication. However, the professors' use of neologisms does not affect interest and satisfaction of the class. Many respondents think the use of neologism is for the younger generation, therefore, when a professor communicates with a student using neologisms used by the student, it does not affect the formation of a positive relationship between the student and the professor. Many students expressed that if the instructor used the new word in an appropriate situation, it would positively affect communication with students and class time. This means that the use of neologisms should be used according to the utterance situation and the utterance context. (Daejeon University)

This study investigated differences in the use of grammar learning strategies among EFL learners' with varying proficiency levels according to grammatical test item. The meditating effect of indirect strategies on direct strategies and grammar proficiency was also examined. Data were analyzed from 178 respondents to a closed-question survey of grammar learning strategies. Test items referred to in the survey were classified into four grammatical units: words, verb phrases, verbal phrases, and clauses. The findings can be summarized as follows: (1) There is a significant difference by level in the use of direct strategies; (2) at higher levels of proficiency, metacognitive strategies have a significant influence on proficiency; and (3) at higher levels, metacognitive strategies have a mediating effect on direct strategies and grammar proficiency in the area of verb phrases. Pedagogical implications of the findings are subsequently presented. (Kongju National University ‧ Chungnam National University)

Since Firth (1957) and Sinclair (1991), it has long been assumed that speakers' attitudes towards a word or a group of words in the actual utterance are decided by their collocates. Previous research on the semantic prosody has been conducted around semantically related words, making fine-grained meaning distinctions between the synonymous words. However, a few studies, if any, distinguish between words' literal and metaphorical senses in defining their semantic prosodies. This paper focuses on whether there is any change in semantic prosody when the literal senses of words are extended to metaphorical ones. The result shows a change in semantic prosody especially when a word is not involved in a word group where positive, negative and neutral prosodies are assigned to their members. (Chosun University)

Synonyms are a problematic aspect of learning English as a foreign language. This corpus-based study aimed to explore the collations of four English synonymous adjectives: “able, capable, competent, qualified.” For collocation analysis, concordance lines of four adjectives were retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It is quite a burdensome task for English learners to learn every synonym's nuance. Using world-class corpus data could help English language learners learn synonyms by exploring and understanding synonyms' collocation and syntactic patterns with accuracy in language use. The corpus-based data of the adjectives mentioned above were compared and investigated in order to see the similarities and differences. The results showed that the synonymous adjectives shared some core meanings and could be used interchangeably in some particular contexts. However, the collocation and syntactic patterns of the adjectives had various differences. The results of this study reveal that corpus can be used as an effective strategy to distinguish and understand the synonyms in EFL. The study recommends using corpus-based analysis in language teaching to clarify synonym use and enhance language learners' vocabulary. (Chungnam State University ‧ Chungwoon University)

Recent studies have shown that recurrent neural language models (LMs) can understand sentences involving filler-gap dependency (Chowdhury & Zamparelli, 2018; Wilcox et al., 2018, 2019). However, their behavior does not encode the underlying constraints that govern filler-gap acceptability. In this vein, significant issues remain about the extent to which LMs acquire specific linguistic constructions and whether these models recognize an abstract property of syntax in their representations. In this paper, following the lead of Bhattacharya and van Schijndel (2020), we further test whether the L2 neural LM can learn abstract syntactic constraints that have been claimed to govern the behavior of filler-gap constructions. To see this, we implement the L2 neural LM trained on the L2 corpus of English textbooks published in Korea for the last two decades, and then we test the representational overlap between disparate filler-gap constructions based on the syntactic priming paradigm. Unlike the previous studies of L1-neural LMs, we could not find sufficient evidence showing that the L2 neural LM learns a general representation of the existence of filler-gap dependency and the shared underlying constraints. (Dongguk University)