This study investigates how Korean adult learners of English acquire the English reflexives and whether their learning process is constrained by Universal Grammar(UG). Reflexives in English and in Korean have different syntactic properties. According ...
This study investigates how Korean adult learners of English acquire the English reflexives and whether their learning process is constrained by Universal Grammar(UG). Reflexives in English and in Korean have different syntactic properties. According to the effects of the Governing Category(GCP) and Proper Antecedent Parameter(PAP) from Welxler and Manzini(1987), Korean reflexives can be bound to both long-distance antecedents and local antecedents, whereas English reflexives must be bound to local antecedents only. Since the relevant parameter is different, when Korean learn English reflexives, the initial state of Korean learners may use Korean parametric value to interpret English reflexives. While they are being exposed to linguistic input for English, they finally learn the parametric value which the target language has.
In order to examine how Korean EFL learners of English reset parameters of Korean reflexives to English reflexives, an experiment was performed in this study. The experimental group consisted of Korean learners of English at three different levels, 30 advanced level and 45 intermediate level students from university and graduate school, and 58 low level students from second grade in high school. Fifteen native speakers of English served as a control group. These subjects responded to a test on reflexives that used a grammaticality judgement task, and a truth value judgement task to mark true or flase on the potential antecedents of English reflexives. The result of this experiment shows that Korean L2 learners in low level transfer their L1 parameter setting and make errors in choice for correct answers on English reflexives. However, the result also shows evidence that the Korean L2 learners who gain more English proficiency to high level can reset the parameters of Korean reflexives to the English value.