The main goal of this thesis is to examine whether adult Korean leaners of English can acquire the English Resultative Construction. In particular, this study is concerned with the issue of whether the relative degree of difficulty of English resultat... The main goal of this thesis is to examine whether adult Korean leaners of English can acquire the English Resultative Construction. In particular, this study is concerned with the issue of whether the relative degree of difficulty of English resultative sentences somehow influences the degree of comprehension on those sentences by Korean learners with different level of proficiency. The English Resultative Construction is a form that describes the final state of an object as the result of the completion of causing event. Resultatives normally consist of a verb, a noun phrase, and resulting phrase. However, resultatives may look as if they are not well-formed sentences since appear to violate some rules in prescriptive grammar. Thus, it would not be harmful to assume Koreans, who study English as a second language, have difficulty understanding English resultatives. There are many theories in second language acquisition, but this study basically assumes that Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1965) can play a role in second language acquisition just as in the case of first language acquisition. In particular, this thesis aims to show which of Full Access Hypothesis and No Access Hypothesis, Partial Access Hypothesis. To this end, two tests were carried out against about 70 adult Korean learners of English. For the test, English Resultatives were divided into three levels depending on how many grammatical principles, such as selectional restrictions and argument valency, appear to be violated: level 0 for Selected Object-controlled Transitive Resultatives, level 1 for Subject-controlled Intransitive Resultatives, and level 2 for Unselected Normal Transitive Resultatives and Fake Reflexive Resultatives. The first test consisted of 33 grammaticality judgment items of English resultatives. The second test was a cloze test which was made up of eight questions. According to the learners’ English proficiency level measured by their TOEIC scores, they were divided into three group: the advanced group, the upper-intermediate group, and the pre-intermediate group. The result of the test can be summarized as follows. As for the first test results, the group of higher level of English learners tended to accept English resultatives as grammatical sentences correctly in the grammatical judgment test overall. It appears that the learners of English resultatives felt difficulty comprehending the test items in the orders of level 2, 1, and 0. As the resultatives’ difficulty level increased, the gap among the groups decreased because all of the groups have a difficulty understanding. When it comes to the results of the second test, the group of higher level of English learners got a higher score than the lower level group in the cloze test. Also, they got more wrong answers in level 2 than 1, and 0. Just like the grammatical judgement test, the gap of the percentage of correct answers among the groups decreased as the difficulty level increased, so no matter what the level of English competence they had, the subjects provided wrong answers in level 2. In conclusion, it is shown that level 2, the highest level of English resultatives in difficulty were hard even for the advanced group to attain. The results obtained in the current study lend support to “Partial Access Hypothesis” about the role of UG in second language acquisition. It can thus be concluded that due to the failure of parameter resetting, not all Korean English learners acquire English resultatives, unlike native speakers. ，韩语论文网站，韩语论文题目 |
