This study aims to examine the adoption patterns of Korean adverb order by comparing native Korean speakers with English-speaking learners of Korean. While English has strong normative constraints on word order, Korean has relatively weaker word order...
This study aims to examine the adoption patterns of Korean adverb order by comparing native Korean speakers with English-speaking learners of Korean. While English has strong normative constraints on word order, Korean has relatively weaker word order restrictions. Due to these linguistic characteristics, word order education has often been neglected in Korean language education. Nevertheless, Korean also possesses preferred or adhered-to word orders. While Korean adverb word order is relatively unconstrained, the existence of preferred or more appropriate orderings raises the need for educational intervention. However, the lack of comprehensive education on this issue often leads foreign learners to arrange adverbs in orders they find awkward or inappropriate. Learners often rely on their native language to determine adverb order, and when the orderings of their native and target languages conflict, they frequently place adverbs in unnatural or inappropriate orders. This study focused on this issue and sought to examine the adoption patterns of adverb order by learners and their native language speakers.
To this end, Chapter 2 compares the adverb classification systems of Korean and English by language, examines the syntactic and semantic characteristics of each Korean and English adverb, and reports on the typical regularities in the word order arrangement between adverbs.
Chapter III presents the experimental design and analysis methods in detail. The experiment consisted of an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) using 80 items (20 category pairs × 4 items). The adverb categories were divided into five categories: modality, time, place, frequency, and manner. After cross-arranging the two categories, the acceptability of these items was tested with native Korean speakers and English-speaking Korean learners. Specifically, each item was categorized into four types based on the consistency of the adverb order in Korean and English: mutual agreement between Korean and English adverb order, mutual inconsistency between Korean and English adverb order, Korean agreement-English inconsistency, and English agreement-Korean inconsistency. The participants included 30 native Korean speakers and 30 English-speaking Korean learners, and each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale. Chapter IV presents a comparative analysis of the results of the experiment conducted with native Korean speakers and native Korean learners.
Native Korean speakers showed little inter-individual variability in their judgments of adverb order acceptability, demonstrating overall consistency. This suggests that native Korean speakers, as native speakers, have a consistent preferred order for arranging Korean adverbs. In contrast, English-speaking learners of Korean showed relatively greater individual variability in their judgments of acceptability. Even after controlling for learner proficiency, the significant differences in learner perceptions of adverb order, unlike Korean proficiency, suggest that learners have not yet grasped clear syntactic norms regarding adverb word order. This suggests that learners, when judging adverb order, rely partially on their individual learning experiences or the word order system of their native language, rather than on consistent Korean word order principles.
In the mutual agreement type of Korean-English adverbial arrangement, both native Korean speakers and English-speaking learners of Korean showed high acceptability judgments, and there were no significant differences overall. In the mutual mismatch type of Korean-English adverbial arrangement, native Korean speakers and English-speaking learners of Korean showed low acceptability judgments in common, but English-speaking learners showed significantly lower scores than native Korean speakers. In the Korean agreement-English mismatch type, the most significant difference in results between groups was the result value, with native Korean speakers showing high acceptability judgments and English-speaking learners of Korean showing low acceptability judgments. Conversely, in the English agreement-Korean mismatch type, English-speaking learners of Korean showed high acceptance of frequency adverbs preceding time and place adverbs, and manner adverbs preceding time, place, and place adverbs, whereas native Korean speakers showed relatively low acceptance.
These results confirm that word order differences between the native and target languages significantly influence learners' perceptions of acceptability, even in the area of adverbial arrangement. This expands the explanatory power of the weak hypothesis of contrastive analysis and suggests the importance of Korean word order education.
This study is significant in that it experimentally tested the order of Korean adverbs and, based on the results, suggested practical implications for Korean adverbial arrangement education. Future research should include studies targeting learners of languages other than English to examine any differences in the acquisition of adverbial arrangement based on their native language. These findings and suggestions can serve as historical and methodological references for future research on Korean adverbial arrangement education.