Jae-Il Yeom. 2018. Embedded Declaratives in Korean. Language and Information, 22.1, 1 -27. This paper deals with three verbs that take a declarative clause. The verb al ‘know’ takes a ko-phrase, which is non-factive, and a kes-phrase, which describes a fact. The verb mit ‘believe’ also takes both, but a kes-phrase taken by the verb denotes a proposition. The verb sayngkakha ‘think’ takes a ko-phrase, but not a kes-phrase. I claim that a ko-phrase is a predicate which reflects what is in the mind of the subject. A kes-phrase expresses something that exists independently of the epistemic process. It can be a fact or a proposition that is given. If a kes-phrase is selected by al, it denotes a fact and if a kes-phrase is selected by mit, it denotes a proposition. sayngkakha only expresses an epistemic state, and it does not take a kes-phrase. I also discuss an adnominal declarative clause as part of a kes-phrase.

Park, Myung-Kwan and Chung, Wonil. 2018. An ERP study of ellipsis resolution in Korean. Language and Information, 22.1, 29-56. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prediction/integration of syntactic structure during sentence processing, employing the construction that allows a TP ellipsis or Sluicing-like interpretation in Korean. To this aim we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from Korean native speakers while they read ellipsis constructions where the syntactic context allows or disallows remnants/ survivors (mis)matching with their explicit/implicit correlates in terms of Case/case (postposition) particle, also reflecting voice (mis)match between the antecedent and the ellipsis clauses. The Korean speakers were able to predict clausal syntactic structure on the basis of the antecedent clause and integrate it into the ellipsis site, thereby quickly detecting voice match/mismatch, as suggested by an ERP difference between matched and mismatched remnants/survivors neighboring the ellipsis site.

The study examinedresponse time in Chinese-English two-way translation in order to explore the role ofword frequency in modulating translation asymmetries between forward and backwardtranslation. 23 Chinese learners of English at two different proficiency levels performed aword translation task of 90 concrete nouns, one-syllable in English words and twocharacters in Chinese words. The results showed that there were asymmetries betweenthe two translation directions, with backward translation taking significantly longer timethan forward translation. Word frequency played a role in modulating the asymmetriesin that translating high-frequency items, regardless of direction, took significantly shortertime than the mid- and low-frequency items. But backward translation displayed largermagnitude of sensitivity to the variation of frequency than forward translation. It wassuggested that both forward and backward translation were conceptually-mediated withdiffering strength in the linking between the lexical items and their conceptualrepresentations, being stronger with high-frequency items than mid- and low-frequencyitems. Conceptual activation is easier for high frequency items.

Arum Kang. 2018. The scalar intensifier ku in Korean : The case of KUintensifier with anti-specific wh-indeterminates, Language and Information, 22-1, 73-89. The purpose of this paper is to present the account of the novel function of ku in Korean. I will focus on the emphatic variant of ku co-occurring with anti-specific wh-indeterminates (i.e., Free Choice Items, Negative Polarity Items, Referential Vagueness Items), which has generally received less attention than the definite one. I suggest that the meaning of ku in this case is not associated with the core property of definiteness. Instead, given the set of empirical data, my proposal is that (i) the hallmark properties of emphatic ku are suggested as a) scalarity, b) additivity, c) weak polarity, and (ii) the pragmatic contribution of the emphatic ku can be characterized in terms of scalar intensifier. The scalar intensifier ku contributes the presupposition that there is a set of alternatives of anti-specific wh-indeterminates which is base-α, and that these alternatives are ranked on a scale. Its scalar presupposition denotes the least likely values on the likelihood scale. The implication of my finding leads to the fact that Korean is a language which reveals a dichotomy in encoding distinct type of weak familiarity (i.e., the scalar intensifier ku) and strong familiarity (i.e., the definite ku).

This study aims to demonstrate how the authorship attribution techniques can be applied to historical texts, exploring the potential of authorship attribution as a solution to the real world authorship disputes and the possibility of multidisciplinary research that combines humanities and quantitative text analytics. History and literary studies have used traditional methods of judging the similarity of topics and subject matters or relying on extra-textual information to solve the authorship problems. This subjective and anecdotal approach to authorship needs to be complemented by incorporating objective and quantitative methodology that examines intra-textual clues. As the first case study, we performed machine learning-based authorship attribution analysis on the 164 opinion texts with unknown authorship from GaeByeok magazine of the 1920s. To enhance accuracy and reliability of the analysis, an improved machine learning algorithm was devised based on SVM by incorporating three parameters α, β, θ into the prediction model. This study is also a case study showing how to perform the authorship attribution analysis in an open setting, not in a closed setting. We hope that the prediction results of the analysis will encourage and facilitate more productive discussion among related disciplines on authorship identification and verification of real historical texts.

The present study addresses how English expressions produced by Korean native speakers are close to common expressions used by English native speakers. To this end, this article provides a quantitative study of the Yonsei English Learner Corpus using a skill set derived from computational linguistics. The focus of the current work is on a language model of English texts written by Korean university students. A language model refers to a collection of logarithmic N-grams described in the ARPA format, and this model serves to discriminate native-like sentences from awkward sentences. The present study compares a language model acquired from an L2 corpus to the other language models acquired from two L1 corpora in English: namely, English Gigaword and Europarl. The present study utilizes Genia Sentence Splitter to separate the sentences and SRILM to create the language models in a computationally tractable way. On the one hand, a deep analysis of N-grams is presented. This analysis consists of two subtasks. First, the N-grams are tallied and evaluated using common metrics of computational linguistics. Second, as an evaluation of the language model, the perplexity of each language model is measured and compared to a reference point drawn from five test data sources. On the other hand, an analysis of linear regression is made so as to detect the patterns of overused and underused expressions in English texts written by Korean speakers.

This study examines pedagogical appropriateness of metalinguistic terms being used in pedagogical grammar books and English teacher’s guide books for secondary school teachers in Korea. It first presents criteria for good grammatical terms and evaluates metalinguistic terms based on the criteria. The terms are “subordinate conjunction” that, “relative pronoun” that, and “subordinate conjunction” after/before, all of which are terms from traditional grammar. This study proposes new terms for those forms and suggests that the grammatical terms in English teaching materials needs to be designed for learners, drawing upon the latest linguistics and applied linguistic research.

This paper compares translations done by professional human translators (as manifested in the Babel English-Chinese Parallel Corpus) and machine translations produced by Google Translate (with English as the source language and Simplified Chinese as the target language). Capitalizing on the branching direction of these two languages, we investigated translation strategies of restrictive relative clauses by focusing on which-relatives. The specific objectives of the study were to (a) extract relevant data from a parallel corpus; (b) assess machine translation quality; and (c) highlight the similarities and dissimilarities between corpus outputs and machine translation outputs. Of the 147 test materials, 115 Google Translate outputs (78.2%) were rated as ‘successful’ or ‘acceptable’. No significant differences were found between the degree of success in machine translations and linguistic factors (e.g., the active or passive voice in relative clauses). This finding confirms that linguistic knowledge is not required when using statistical machine translation (SMT) such as Google Translate. Another noteworthy finding was that Google Translate did not use the least frequently occurring translation strategy in the parallel corpus. This is not surprising given that SMT systems greatly rely on parallel corpora for training statistical translation models.

We conducted a psycholinguistic experiment in which native speakers of Korean orally produced sentences using a subject, a temporal adjunct, a locative adjunct, an accusative object, and a verb, presented in a pseudo-randomized way on the computer screen before each trial. Results of the experiment indicate that Korean speakers produce the temporal adjunct earlier than the locative one irrespective of the manipulated length difference between the adjuncts. This ‘time-before-place’ preference is argued to reflect the production strategy to put the sentence constituents describing the event structure as closely as possible, thereby minimizing the cost for communicating the propositional contents of the predicate. The underlying assumption of this interpretation is that locative adjuncts belong to the necessary part of the event description, whereas the temporal adjuncts do not. We conclude that even in free word order languages like Korean, word order might well be constrained by various processing strategies operating at the performance level for a more efficient communication.

ISO-Space refers to the ISO-Space (2014b) annotation standard for spatial information in language. Soon after its publication, Lee (2016) and Pustejovsky and Lee (2017) noted its failure to conform to the principles of semantic annotation laid down in the principles of semantic annotation (ISO 2016) and also its inadequacy to capture the dynamic aspect of spatial information involving trajectories created by motions. This paper thus proposes to revise ISO-Space to focus on the dynamic aspect of spatial information, while making the revised version, tentatively named ”I-Space”, conform to the ISO (2016) principles of semantic annotation. For this revision, four modifications are introduced. First, event-paths are formally defined as sequences of spatio- temporal locations associated with motional trajectories. Second, these trajectories are treated as genuine spatial entities of the event-path type in their annotation structures. Third, the link, tagged < moveLink >, in ISO-Space is re-formulated as a relation between a moving object and an event-path traversed by that object. Fourth, the spatial measure link, tagged < mLink >, in ISO-Space is generalized to cover spatiotemporal measures involving both space and time, and motions.