• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.440-449
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• 2007

This paper provides a fine-grained analysis of Korean serial verb constructions within the HPSG framework, and covers major descriptive characteristics of the phenomena. This paper discusses constraints on serial verb constructions in terms of four aspects; transitivity, argument structure, semantic properties, and complementizers. As a result, 17 constraints have been built, which support the type hierarchies for Korean serial verb constructions. This paper also presents a sample derivation on the basis of on the constraints and the type hierarchies.

• Language and Information
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.87-99
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• 2003

This paper investigates the role of input frequency in the acquisition of verb argument structures based on distributional information of a corpus of utterances derived from the English CHILDES database (MacWhinney 1993). It has been widely accepted that children successfully learn verb argument structures by innate language mechanisms, such as linking rules which connect verb meanings and its syntactic structures. In contrast, an approach to language acquisition called “statistical language learning” has currently claimed that children could succeed in acquiring syntactic structures in the absence of innate language mechanisms, making use of distributional properties of the input. In this paper, I evaluate the feasibility of the statistical learning in acquiring verb argument structures, based on distributional information about locative verbs in parental input. The naturalistic data allow us to investigate to what extent the statistical learning approach can and cannot help children succeed in learning the syntax of locative verbs. Based on the results of English database analysis, I show that there is rich statistical information for learning the syntactic possibilities of locative verbs in parental input, despite some limitations in the statistical learning approach.

• Language and Information
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.85-105
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• 2005

This study aims at investigating the 'verb-second' phenomena indicated in complex sentences of medieval Spanish. Especially, when the complex sentence is composed of a preposed adverbial clause and its succeeding main clause, the subject inversion is noticeable in the latter. The fundamental motive of this type of inversion is due to the 'verb-second' structure, in which a topic appears in the first position and the verb immediately after the topic. So it can be said that the subject inversion is a prerequisite for a verb to be located in the second position when the adverbial clause functions as a topic to the main clause, as is often the case with Germanic languages like German, Dutch, etc.. On the contrary, modern Spanish complex sentences do not show this phenomenon, with a strong tendency to locate a grammatical subject in the preverbal position. Therefore, medieval Spanish might be typologically closer to Germanic languages than to modern Spanish. In order to argue for this assumption, the formal and functional criteria by which the preposed adverbial clause could be defined as a topic NP will be examined across the comparition with left-dislocation structure.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.183-195
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• 2005

In the present study, we investigated development of verb inflections or endings in 3- to 5-year old Korean-speaking children using 28 action verbs for both comprehension and production tasks. For each verb, a l0-second long motion picture and a sheet of paper with three random-ordered color pictures representing 'before, in the middle of, at the end of' the action were generated. A past tense inflection' -et ta,' two present progressive verb endings '-enta' & '-ko itta.' a future tense ending '-elyeko hanta' were tested. In the comprehension task, children were asked to point to a picture correctly representing the tense of a presented verb. In the production task, children were asked to produce a verb with correctly marking the tense of a presented picture. The order of the two tasks were counterbalanced across the children, and the motion pictures were only presented in the first task. Across the ages, the performance accuracies on both comprehension and production tasks were the highest for the past tense marking followed by two present progressive and future tense markings. For each verb endings, the changes of accuracies across ages were analyzed in both tasks. The types of errors for production tasks were also reported.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.302-313
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• 2000

In English-Korean machine translation, transitive verb-objective collocation is utilized for accurate translation of an English verbal phrase into Korean. This paper presents an algorithm for correct verb translation based on the k-nearest neighbor learning. The semantic distance is defined on the WordNet for the k-nearest neighbor learning. And we also present algorithms for automatic collocation dictionary optimization. The algorithms extract transitive verb-objective pairs as training examples from large corpora and minimize the examples, considering the tradeoff between translation accuracy and example size. Experiments show that these algorithms optimized collocation dictionary keeping about 90% accuracy for a verb 'build'.

• Language and Information
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.73-91
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• 2004

The nominative and accusative postpositions in Korean may intervene between the negative auxiliary verb ANH and its complement verb phrase. As Korean is an OV language, this means that 'verb + {nom, acc} + ANH' as well as the simpler concatenation 'verb + ANH' is possible. This fact, together with an overwhelming regularity of these postpositions' optionality in virtually all constructions, poses a problem for formal approaches to the syntax of the language. Working in a constraint-based grammatical framework shaped by such works as Sag and Wasow (1999) and Copestake (2002), we put forth type hierarchies for major_class, which represents verb inflection, and for pos, which has two immediate subtypes, i.e., htrp_pos and ord_pos. What we call the 'half transparency' of the case postpositions separates them from all the other lexical items in the language. The type htrp_pos is used to constrain one of the two newly proposed head_comp_rules, where a newly proposed feature HEAD2 of a phrase inherits its value from the HEAD feature of the head word. The COMPS list of the negative auxiliary ANH is seen as containing a single phrase whose HEAD is a kind of nominal clause and whose HEAD2 is something that is one of the three maximal types: acc, nom, and null.

• Language and Information
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.1-20
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• 2006

We can distinguish two different groups of 'fusion expressions' depending on whether the verb (-ko) ha- 'do' can be recovered from the contracted expression concerned or not: recoverable and unrecoverable fusion expressions. Many expressions belonging to the former group show alternations between the [da]-type and the [dae]-type: e.g., o-nta-nta and o-ntae-nta '...says... is coming.' On the other hand, some expressions like ka-ntae can only be realized as the [dae]-type. The main purpose of this paper is to account for these [dae]-type expressions. First, we assume that they have an inaudible/invisible quotation $verb\;{\phi}-$, which takes as its complement a verb phrase with a neutral speech-level ending. This quotation verb is derived from the quotation verb ha-. Second, we assume that the quotation $verbs\;{\phi}-$ and ha- have the [j] sound as their stem-final element, which means that these verbs are actually represented as ${\phi}-j-$ and ha-j-, respectively. In this system, the [tae]-type expressions come out naturally from the behavior of the [j] sound. We do not employ any ad hoc phonological rules to derive the [dae]-type expressions from the corresponding [da]-type expressions.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.123-131
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate the comprehension and production of various tense markings in Korean-speaking children with and without language delay. Thirty children with language delay(LD) and 30 typically developing(TD) children participated in the study. In each group, half were at the age of 4-years and the other half at 7-years. In both the comprehension and production task, 28 verbs containing four types of tense markings were used: past tense '-et ta', two present progressives '-ko itta', '-enta', and future tense '-elyeko hanta'. In the comprehension task, the children were presented with three printed still-scenes of video recording of a verb action, each representing future, present progressive, and past tense of the verb, respectively. Then they listened to the action verb with one of the 4 tense markings and had to pick the scene that matched the verb tense. In the production task, the children were given one of the three scenes and asked to produce the verb with appropriate tense marking. In both tasks, the LD children performed significantly worse than the TD children, and the older children performed significantly better than the younger children. Interestingly, the pattern of performances across different types of tense markings at the two language-age levels were closely similar in LD children and TD children. This similarity of groups seemed stronger in the comprehension task than the production task.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2002.11a
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• pp.101-104
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• 2002

The purpose of this study was to investigate which model among Fullist, Decomposition, and Hybrid was appropriate for explaining the process of Korean verb, especially on tense prefinal ending, connective ending, and morphological passive affix. Three experiment was performed. The results of experiment 1, 2, 3 suggest that it is necessary for a new model of Korean verb processing.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.24
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• pp.132-146
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• 2011

This paper is intended to describe the idiosyncratic aspects of the verb way construction in English, clarifying the productivity property of this construction and to elucidate the claim that this construction displays the properties of language-general, not a language-particular by comparing the behaviors from Dutch. And this paper will argue against the lexical approach and explain the drastic mismatches in syntax and semantics responsible for the constructional properties as one type of directional motion constructions by proposing a constructional analysis in HPSG.