Acquisition of Preposition Stranding and Pied-piping in Relative Clauses and Wh-questions by Korean EFL Learners

Abstract

Shin, Eun Young, Yoon, Junghyoe, & Chung, Taegoo. 2016. Acquisition of Preposition Stranding and Pied-piping in Relative Clauses and Wh-questions by Korean EFL Learners. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 41-1, 67-93. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the acquisition of preposition stranding (PS) and preposition pied-piping (PP) in relative clauses and wh-questions by Korean middle school and college students. This study examined linguistic factors affecting the grammaticality judgment of learners at different proficiency levels such as position of preposition (PS/PP), semantic dependency between a verb and a preposition (bound/free), and construction type (wh-question/relative clause). We also inspected language-external factors such as input and instruction through textbook analysis and a teacher survey. The findings of the present study showed that input saliency conditioned the overall acquisition of the PS, which is prevalent in input. On the other hand, the infrequent PP was affected by construction type and V-PP semantic dependency to a greater degree than was the PS. (Korea University)