TThe Acquisition of Personal and Temporal Reference in English Interlanguage A Longitudinal Study

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study provides a systematic analysis of how devices referring to people and time are developed by longitudinally investigating the process by which two Korean ESL speakers acquired personal and temporal reference in the context of both spoken and written English discourse. The data for the study consist of approximately 44 hours of NS-NNS spontaneous conversations and the written corpus elicited from the journal entries over twelve months.
The qualitative and quantitative analyses offer insights into an emerging pattern regarding the use of personal reference forms. The learners in general displayed a gradual development from deviant use of referential forms to target like use, but the qualitative analysis of the data reveals that they had difficulties in applying appropriate referential forms in discourse contexts. The ability to choose the appropriate linguistic forms by considering the discourse context seems to carry a heavy cognitive load, and thus it is not acquired until fairly late in the developmental continuum.
The results of the learners' expression of past time reference confirm that there is a stage prior to verb morphology--even though the appropriate use of the target language forms is not acquired in the earlier stages--where the Learners depended on the discourse stricture of the topic and on adverbials to express past time events. Further, in their use of regular past forms, learners' data represent a disproportionate distribution by oral and written modes, which seems to stem from the pronunciation difficulties the learners have due to Ll phonological structure.
The examination of the association between verb morphology and lexical aspect supports the Aspect Hypothesis. The analysis of both token and type counts reveals that learners marked past tense first on telic and punctual predicates, present tense first on state predicates, and progressive marking first on activity predicates. The predicted extension of past tense marking, i.e., from telic and punctual to activity and state, was also observed. However, the spread of present tense and the progressive marking was not observed. The native speakers' data confirm the Distributional Bias Hypothesis, but represent a weaker association between verb morphology and lexical aspect than that of the learners.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• List of Figures = vii
• List of Tables = ix
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS = xiii
• VITA = xiv
• ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION = xvii
• CHAPTER 1 Introduction = 1
• 1.1. Purpose = 1
• 1.2. Organization of the dissertation = 2
• CHAPTER 2 Literature review = 4
• 2.1. Personal reference system = 4
• 2.1.1. Personal reference in English and Korean = 5
• 2.1.2. Research on personal reference = 10
• 2.2. Temporal reference = 13
• 2.2.1. Tense and aspect = 13
• 2.2.2. Past tense in English and Korean = 17
• 2.2.3. Research on acquisition of temporality = 19
• 2.2.3.1. Research on acquisition of past time reference = 19
• 2.2.3.2. Research on lexical aspect = 22
• 2.3. Purpose of the study = 26
• 2.4. Research questions = 26
• 2.4.1. Personal reference = 27
• 2.4.2. Past time reference = 27
• 2.4.3. Lexical aspect = 28
• CHAPTER 3 Method = 30
• 3. 1. Participants = 30
• 3. 2. Data = 32
• 3.2.1. Oral data = 32
• 3.2.2. Written data = 34
• 3.3. Longitudinal design = 35
• 3.4. Transcription = 36
• 3.5. Preliminary analysis = 38
• 3.5.1. Topics and themes = 38
• 3.5.2. Personal reference = 39
• 3.5.3. Temporal reference = 43
• 3.5.3.1. Past time reference = 43
• 3.5.3.2. Lexical aspect = 44
• CHAPTER 4 Results: Personal reference = 48
• 4.1. Topics and themes = 48
• 4.2. Personal reference = 50
• 4.2.1. Exophoric reference = 50
• 4.2.2. Anaphoric reference = 55
• 4.2.2.1. Anaphoric reference in the NSs' data = 55
• 4.2.2.2. Anaphoric reference in the learners' data = 59
• 4.2.2.2.1. Introduction of a new referent = 59
• 4.2.2.2.2. Introduction of a known referent = 66
• 4.2.2.2.3. Reference maintenance = 73
• 4.2.2.2.4. Reference reintroduction = 87
• 4.2.3. Summary of the results of personal reference = 91
• CHAPTER 5 Results: Temporal reference = 93
• 5.1. Past time reference = 93
• 5.2. Lexical aspect = 108
• 5.2.1. Past tense marking = 109
• 5.2.2. Progressive marking = 118
• 5.2.3. The present tense = 121
• 5.2.4, Summary of the results = 126
• CHAPTER 6 Discussion = 128
• 6.1. Personal reference = 128
• 6.2. Temporal reference = 132
• 6.2.1. Past time reference = 132
• 6.2.2. The Aspect Hypothesis and the Distributional Bias Hypothesis = 134
• 6.3. Pedagogical implications = 137
• CHAPTER 7 Conclusion = 140
• REFERENCES = 143
• APPENDIX A Questions for monologues = 153
• APPENDIX B Instructions for weekly journal = 155
• APPENDIX C Sample journal entry (Ran) = 156
• APPENDIX D Sample journal entry (Jung) = 157
• APPENDIX E Transcription conventions = 158
• APPENDIX F Sample transcription = 159