An Analysis of the Acquisition of Korean College Students’English Split Antecedence

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the acquisition of split antecedence in L2 English by Korean learners. First, we have argued against the pronominal anaphor analysis. Second, we have maintained that the ability to take split antecedents in Korean unlike English may be viewed as a property of the plural morpheme tul, rather than that of the reflexive itself and that the permitted pronominal split antecedence is consistent with the Principle B effect, just as in English. Third, we have claimed that in the case of both anaphor binding and pronominal binding, the Korean adults show a strong preference toward the long-distance split antecedents. This in turn suggests that the adults do not entertain the hypothesis that anaphors and pronouns are in complementary distribution. In addition, the results of our experiment clearly illustrate the fact that in the case of reflexive binding, learning takes place through positive transfer and negative transfer of native binding. The results of our experiment also indicate that the adults did not completely capture the properties associated with English pronominal binding. This is motivated by the fact that English pronominal sentences pose a problem in applying Binding Principle B by the adults. We have also noted that the Korean learners of English did not judge split antecedence of English pronominals in accordance with their L1, namely transfer. Finally, we have argued that in the case of pronominal binding, the acquisition of long-distance binding in L2 English by the Korean learners may be affected by Universal Grammar, whereas in the case of anaphor binding, the acquisition of long-distance binding in L2 English by the Korean learners may not. Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that Binding Condition B may be part of the innate endowment that children bring to the language acquisition task, but Binding Condition A may not.