• 영어어문교육
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.199-216
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• 2009

This study investigates how Korean speakers develop their interlanguage of English passive constructions with a reference to the learners' grammar proficiency levels. Sixty two college students of different levels of English participated in this study. They were asked to complete a sentence-completion task. Their production was classified into accurate passives, malformed passives, pseudo-passives, unaccusatives, and actives according to the use of transitive, ergative and unergative verbs. They then were further analyzed depending on the subjects' levels of grammar by three main factors: L1 transfer, the English voice system, and universal cognitive factors. The results showed that the subjects of the lower group produced more pseudo-passives, malformed passives, and overpassivization than those of the higher group, and even subjects of higher group still made passives for ergative verbs. It was also shown that L1 and universal factors had more influence on the lower group than on the higher group. Based on the analyses of the subjects' responses, the development of the English passive system by Korean learners is shown and some implications are suggested for effective teaching of English.

• 한국영어학회지:영어학
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• 제2권4호
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• pp.537-553
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• 2002

This paper discusses various problems related to the teaching of English grammar at Korean universities. We first discuss whether English grammar should be taught at universities, and, if it is, what kind of English grammar needs to be taught. We propose that the English grammar we teach to Korean undergraduate students be eclectic in the sense that the traditional grammar established by Jespersen and others be the major source of instruction, supplemented, if necessary, by school grammar and also by linguistically oriented grammars such as generative grammar or cognitive grammar. Then we discuss the content of the English grammar that should be included in the curriculum : (i) present perfect vs. past, (ii) will vs. be going to, (iii) must vs. have to, (iv) may vs. can, (v) infinitives vs. gerunds, (vi) conative constructions, and (vii) the passive.

• 영어어문교육
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• 제9권spc호
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• pp.209-222
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• 2003

Transitive relation and its directionality constitute the precondition for passivization, and the present study purports 10 unearth the true properties of transitivity in connection with the passive phenomena. The bottom line it drives at is this transitivity is a notion that can be best explained in 'cognitive' terms. The original direction of transitivity that is predicated by a verb can be reversed depending on the speaker's intention or the discourse situation. In the imperfective verb constructions transitivity can not be derived from only the content of the sentence itself and the predicate objectionally. That depends on the subjective interpretation of speaker considering the cognitive prototype of human to the various complicated situations.

• 한국언어정보학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국언어정보학회 2007년도 정기학술대회
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• pp.234-240
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• 2007

This paper argues that various kinds of displaced structures in English should be licensed by a more explicitly formulated type of rule schema in order to deal with what is called weak connectivity in English. This paper claims that the filler and the gap site cannot maintain the total identity of features but a partial overlap since the two positions need to obey the structural forces that come from occupying respective positions. One such case is the missing object construction where the subject fillers and the object gaps are to observe requirements that are imposed on the respective positions. Others include passive constructions and topicalized structures. In this paper, it is argued that the feature discrepancy comes from the different syntactic positions in which the fillers are assumed to be located before and after displacement. In order to capture this type of mismatch, syntactically relevant features are handled separately from the semantically motivated features in order to deal with the syntactically imposed requirements.

• 영어영문학
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• 제56권5호
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• pp.871-905
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• 2010

This paper is motivated by Watanabe's (2001) observation that English byphrase passives are sometimes translated into Japanese object topicalization constructions. That is, the original English sentence in the passive may be translated into the active voice with the logical object topicalized. A number of scholars, including Chomsky (1981) and Baker (1992), have remarked that languages have various ways to avoid focusing on the logical subject. The aim of the present study is to examine the translation equivalents of the English by-phrase passives in an English-Korean parallel corpus compiled by the author. A small sample of articles from Newsweek magazine and its published Korean translation reveals that there are indeed many ways to translate English by-phrase passives, including object topicalization (12.5%). Among the 64 translated sentences analyzed and classified, 12 (18.8%) examples were problematic in terms of agent defocusing, which is the primary function of passives. Of these 12 instances, five cases were identified where an alternative translation would be more suitable. The results suggest that the functional characteristics of English by-phrase passives should be highlighted in translator training as well as language teaching.