• Language and Information
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.93-111
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• 2010

This article is a description of the case variation in Guarani Language, which is a relatively, rarely studied language, and more so about case phenomena. Guarani has two remarkable facts about case. First, it has two overt accusative case markers, which are differentiated by the semantic notion of boundedness as in Jackendoff(1990, 1991). The existence of accusative case markers in Guarani is attested by their behavior in the typical transitive verb sentences, the ability to occur in ECM constructions, and the interpretation of specificity which is parallel to Turkish accusative case marker realization reported in Enc(1991). Second, accusative case forms occur in adjunct positions as well as object positions in Guarani. To capture these peculiar case phenomena, an account based on some recent Minimalist ideas about case checking from Legate(2008), Bowers(2010) is shown to be available.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.46
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• pp.355-377
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• 2017

Compared with other Altaic languages, Japanese and Korean languages are much closer to each other in grammar, and also to Ryukyuan language. According to the literature, Korean people are the first foreigners to record Ryukyuan language in a written form. In the passage "pronunciation interpreting the Ryukyuan Kingdom" from A Journey to the Eastern Countries (1512), Korean people perfectly preserved the pronunciation and meanings of words and sentences in Ryukyuan language in both Korean and Chinese languages, which is an extremely valuable material. Unfortunately, the later time period witnessed stagnation after a prominent beginning. In order to clarify the language family to which Korean belongs to, it is necessary to thoroughly compare Korean language with Japanese and Ryukyuan languages. Different from lexis, grammar underwent a slow and gradual process of variation. A comparative study of the three languages can provide strong evidence for defining the language family of Korean. Based on this rationale, this paper starts from the comparison of grammar elements of these three languages, aiming at case markers including the nominative case markers and the accusative case markers, and observes the procedures and functions diachronically. Based on the examples from the medieval data, it is found that the nominative case markers and the accusative case markers of these three languages vary from each other in forms and origins. Although they show some similarities in functions, it can be conjectured that there is no cognate for the three languages in the history.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.1-14
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• 2006

This study examined the spontaneous utterances of 20 1-2 year old Korean-Chinese children in Yanji, China by videotaping their spontaneous natural speech during interaction with his/her caregiver for 30 minutes on 4 separate occasions. Utterances were transcribed and coded by nominative and accusative case markers; then analyzed by grammatical functions. Results showed that the order and pattern of the acquisition of the case marking system of Korean-Chinese bilinguals differed from that of Korean monolinguals. Bilinguals used the accusative marker -lul earlier than the nominative marker-ka and overextended the accusative marker more often than the nominative marker. These results are consistent with those of Gathercole (in press) who found that bilingual children differed from monolinguals in mastering grammar.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.207-219
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• 2006

The present study was designed to investigate the comprehension of 'who' and 'what' questions in 2- to 3-year-old normal children. Sixty children were divided into 3 groups depending on their ages, i.e., age groups 2;6-2;11, 3;0-3:5, and 3;6-3;11. Three types of 'who' questions and 2 types of 'what' questions were generated depending on the attached case markers, i.e., who-nominative, who-accusative, who-dative, what-nominative, and what-accusative. The children watched 36 cuts of short video recordings. After watching each cut, they were asked to answer one of the 5 types of wh-questions. For the 'who-nominative' and 'what-accusative' questions, even the late 2-year-old children performed with over 70% of accuracy, and the late 3-year-old children performed with over 95% of accuracy. For the 'who-accusative' and 'who-dative' questions, the late 2-year olds exhibited difficulty in comprehension with performance accuracy of 41% and 33%, respectively. However, the late 3-year olds could comprehend those questions correctly with over 90% of accuracy. On the other hand, in answering 'what-nominative' questions, the children did not show rapid development across the age groups, as the mean performance accuracies of the 3 groups were 39%, 49%, and 59%, respectively. The results indicated that children's understanding of a wh- question is largely affected by the case of the interrogative.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.59-72
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• 2006

In the present study, we investigated the grammaticality judgement skills of children with developmental language impairments. The participants included 20 children with language impairments of ages ranging from 7 to 9 years and of IQ's ranging from 71 to 84, and 40 normally developing children. Twenty normal children were matched with the language impaired children in their language ages and the other 20 normal children were matched with the language impaired children in their chronological ages. The children were asked to judge the grammatical correctness of 48 short sentences, half of which were ungrammatical sentences containing incorrect case-markers and the other half were grammatically correct sentences. Four types of case-markers including nominative "i/ga", accusative "ul/lul", locative "e," and instrumental "ro" were systematically changed to generate the ungrammatical sentences. The language impaired children performed worse than both groups of normally developing children in detecting the ungrammatical sentences and in correcting the case-markers of those sentences. In detecting the errors of ungrammatical sentences, the language impaired children exhibited variable performances across the different case-markers.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.35-51
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• 2000

The goal of this paper is to examine how Case Drop (the drop of the case markers) correlates with the prosodic structure in Korean. On the assumption that intervocalic Lenis Stop Voicing (LSV) applies within the domain of the Accentual Phrase (AP), voicing analyses are performed on intervocalic lenis stop consonants before and after Case Drop. A statistical analysis reveals that the drop of the nominative and accusative case markers significantly alter the AP structure. Pitch values will then be extracted to verify that such changes in the AP structure conform to the pitch properties proposed for the AP (Jun 1993, 1998). The results show that the AP structure suggested by LSV does not always coincide with that imposed by the pitch properties.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.13-21
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• 2014

Late talkers are young children who are delayed in their expressive language skills despite normal nonverbal cognitive ability, adequate hearing and typical personality development. The purpose of this study is to investigate the sentence interpretation strategies used by Korean-speaking late talkers and age-matched normal children. Nine late talkers and nine normal children matched by age at 30-35months were participated in this study. 27 simple noun-noun-verb(NNV) sentences were generated by factorial combination of case-marker [nominal case-marker on the first noun and accusative on the second (C1), accusative on the first noun and nominative on the second (C2), and no case markers on both nouns (C0)], and animacy of the nouns [animate-inanimate(AI), inanimate-animate(IA), animate-animate(AA)]. All the children were asked to "act out" their interpretation of the given sentence. For each type of sentences the percentage of choices of the first noun as the agent was calculated. The results of group (2) ${\times}$ animacy(3) ${\times}$ case-marker(3) mixed ANOVA showed a significant main effect for 'animacy', 'case marker' and 'group(2) ${\times}$ case-marker (3)'. The late talkers relied on semantic (animacy) cues in their interpretation of the sentences, while the normal peers utilized both animacy and grammatical morpheme (case-marker) cues. The results indicated that the late-talkers' comprehension skills were also delayed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.57-66
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• 2007

Case markers in Korean are omissible in colloquial speech. Previous discourse studies of Caseless bare NPs in Korean show that the information structure of zero Nominative not only differs from that of overt Nominative but it also differs from that of zero Accusative in many respects. This paper aims to provide a basis for these semantic/pragmatic properties of Caseless NPs through the syntactic difference between bare subjects and bare objects: namely, the former are left-dislocated NPs, whereas the latter form complex predicates with the subcategorizing verbs. Our analysis will account for the facts that (i) the distribution of bare subject NPs are more restricted than that of bare object NPs; (ii) bare subject NPs must be specific or topical; (iii) Acc-marked NPs in canonical position tend to be focalized.

• Language and Information
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.1-20
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• 2008

This paper examines the effects of focus types on case ellipsis in Korean. A number of previous studies have suggested that accusative case markers in Korean and Japanese cannot be dropped when the object they mark is contrastively focused (Masunaga, 1988; Yatabe, 1999; Ko, 2000; Lee, 2002). Using experimental evidence, we argue against the view that case ellipsis in Korean is sensitive to the distinction between contrastive vs. non-contrastive focus. An alternative analysis is proposed which accounts for the phenomenon of variable case marking in terms of the interaction between the contrastive strength and the discourse accessibility of focused object NPs. By viewing patterns of case ellipsis as the result of balancing between these two forces, such an analysis can correctly predict the gradient pattern of case ellipsis shown by the three types of focused objects tested in the experiment (contrastive replacing focus, contrastive selecting focus and non-contrastive, informational focus), while at the same time offering an explanation for why subtypes of focus exert distinct influences on case ellipsis.

• Language and Information
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.53-76
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• 2007

Case markers in Korean are omissible in colloquial speech. Previous discourse studies of Caseless bare NPs in Korean show that the information structure of zero Nominative not only differs from that of overt Nominative but it also differs from that of zero Accusative in many respects. This paper aims to provide a basis for these semantic/pragmatic properties of Caseless NPs through the syntactic difference between bare subjects and bare objects: namely, the former are left-dislocated NPs, whereas the latter form complex predicates with the subcategorizing verbs. Our analysis will account for the facts that (i) the distribution of bare subject NPs are more restricted than that of bare object NPs; (ii) bare subject NPs must be specific or topical; (iii) Acc-marked NPs in canonical position tend to be focalized.