• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.35-70
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• 2003

This study investigates the acquisition of English prepositions of location and direction by Malaysian Chinese ESL learners. It was conducted with the objective of finding out which of the two types of prepositions was more problematic to the L1 Chinese learners. The study also sought to investigate the effect of age and proficiency levels in English on the acquisition of the English prepositions of location and direction by these learners. Additionally, the study sets out to determine the extent to which the L1 Chinese learners have acquired the English prepositions of location and direction. This study involved three groups of Chinese ESL learners: elementary, intermediate and advanced. They were selected based on their age and their performance on a standardized proficiency test. The instrument used to collect data was a preposition test comprising 85 items. These items on prepositions of location and direction were randomly arranged in the tasks. The test required subjects to respond to multiple choice questions, match given sentences with appropriate prepositions, fill in blanks with the appropriate prepositions, judge given sentences to see if they are grammatical or ungrammatical and correct the ungrammatical sentence by providing the appropriate prepositions. The results indicate that age and proficiency levels of the learners made a difference in the acquisition of English prepositions of location and direction. The older learners with higher proficiency levels seem to fare better than the younger and less proficient learners. The results suggest that the prepositions of location arc slightly more problematic than prepositions of directions to the L1 Chinese learners. Our data also suggest that certain prepositions of each type are more problematic than others.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.576-582
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• 2022

In this paper, we discuss the relative positioning of Wh-related English prepositions in a Wh-interrogative construction within the Optimality Theory [1-2]. By employing the two key constraints such as ^*Prep-Str and Align which are developed for the positioning of Wh-related prepositions from Romance languages such as French and Italian [3] and for the positioning of Wh-related prepositions from the middle English prose from 1500 to 1900 [4-6], and by slightly modifying the constraint hierarchy of ^*Prep-STR >>Align into ^**PrepSTR <<>>Align, Choi argues that his new theory can properly explain the unique behaviors of English Whrelated prepositions being able to take two 'optional' operations such as pied-piping and stranding to find legitimate landing sites in a Wh-interrogative construction [7]. However, this new analysis again reveals the following critical problems: (1) Unlike the 'light' English Wh-related prepositions which can two optional operations for legitimate landing sites in a Wh-interrogative construction, 'heavy' Wh-related English prepositions are not allowed to have such two options: they take just one option of pied-piping only. Thus, (2) his argumentation based on the existing constraints and the modified constraint hierarchy is neither general enough nor proper to explain the issue of the relative positioning for all English Wh-related preposition cases. To include such exceptional syntactic property of the 'heavy' preposition cases within the Optimality Theory, we suggest a new constraint of ^*HPrep-STR ranked at the highest position of the constraint hierarchy to disallow a 'heavy' or multi-syllabic Wh-related English preposition to stay alone at the end of a sentence. The new final hierarchy of constraints we suggest to explain the exceptional positioning of 'heavy' Wh-related prepositions together with the other 'light' Wh-related prepositions in English Wh-interrogative construction will be as follows: ^*HPrep-STR>>Align<<>>^*Prep-STR.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.1057-1085
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• 2009

This paper addresses the question of why prepositions are particularly difficult forEFL learners. The first reason for such difficulty lies in the distinction between seemingly equivalent prepositions such as to and with, as in compared to and compared with. Most monolingual learners' dictionaries regard these two phrases as virtually synonymous. Yet, the results of the corpus analysis conducted in this study indicate that there are differences between the two. A second reason why EFL learners have problems with prepositions is that there are often variations in the inputdata. For example, although from generally follows different, in American English different than is also used. On the other hand, in British English, different to is the second most commonly used construction. This type of regional variation, confirmed in the corpus findings of the present paper, causes confusion in students of English. A learner who is not accustomed to British English may be puzzled by the expression different to. Finally, L1 negative transfer is responsible for the incorrect use of expressions such as discuss about. An error of this sort is the result of interference from the learner's mother tongue. The English verb discuss is not subcategorized for a preposition, whereas the equivalent Korean verb, for example, requires a noun phrase combined with the postposition.

• Language and Information
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.101-116
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• 2004

This paper proposes a statistical model for the translation of prepositions in English-Korean machine translation. In the proposed model, statistical information acquired from unlabeled Korean corpora is used to choose the best translation from several possible translations. Such information includes functional word-verb co-occurrence information, functional word-verb distance information, and noun-postposition co-occurrence information. The model was evaluated with 443 sentences, each of which has a prepositional phrase, and we attained 71.3% accuracy.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.30
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• pp.245-258
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• 2013

This paper analyzes the current Chinese prepositions that represent space and time, which ultimately indicate the concept of Direction. having this in mind, the concept of time that the prepositional phrases 'qian+Tn' and 'Tn+qian' possess can be understood by analyzing the prepositions that 'qian' to make time expressions. also, this paper establishes a systemic framework that will help not only students but also professors to use the preposition 'qian' in order to make correct time expressions.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.330-339
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• 2007

We extracted English expressions that appear in Japanese sentences in newspaper articles and on the Internet. The results obtained from the newspaper articles showed that the preposition "in" has been regularly used for more than ten years, and it is still regularly used now. The results obtained from the Internet articles showed there were many kinds of English expressions from various parts of speech. We extracted some interesting expressions that included English prepositions and verb phrases. These were interesting because they had different word orders to the normal order in Japanese expressions. Comparing the extracted English and katakana expressions, we found that the expressions that are commonly used in Japanese are often written in the katakana syllabary and that the expressions that are not so often used in Japanese, such as prepositions, are hardly ever written in the katakana syllabary.

• School Mathematics
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.261-280
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• 2009

This study was motivated by recognizing the weakness of teaching and learning about the concepts of statements in high school mathematics curriculum. To report the reality of students' understanding about statements, this study investigated the 33 first-year undergraduate students' understanding about the concepts of statements by giving them 22 statement problems. The problems were selected based on the conceptual framework including five types of statement concepts which are considered as the key ideas for understanding mathematical reasoning and proof in college level mathematics. The analysis of the participants' responses to the statement problems found that their understanding about the concepts of prepositions are very limited and extremely based on the instrumental understanding applying an appropriate remembered rule to the solution of a preposition problem without knowing why the rule works. The results from this study will give the information for effective teaching and learning of statements in college level mathematics, and give the direction for the future reforming the unite of statements in high school mathematics curriculum as well.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.53-61
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• 2022

The purpose of this study was to test whether or not the AI chatbot is effective in acquiring target grammar for Korean EFL college students: prepositions and articles. A quasi-experiment was conducted with 46 first-year students taking part in a required English course. They were randomly divided into two groups: the experimental and control groups (23 students for each, respectively). The experimental group was engaged in six chat sessions with a chatbot over 6 weeks. A pretest and a posttest were used to examine the effectiveness of the chatbot by comparing any changes made in error frequencies of the target grammar in participants' English compositions. The results show that after a conversation with the chatbot, the experimental group significantly reduced the mean of omission errors in both prepositions and articles. To have a great effect in other error categories, chatbot feedback needs to be improved to reduce short responses or inaccurate utterances of students and induce them to actively participate in the conversation.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1997.07a
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• pp.81-91
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• 1997

This paper deals with the problems of English listening comprehension: the rate of understanding difference in positions and sentence structures, parts of speech easily missed to understand, English sounds only in English(not in Korean), confusion of sounds, unaccented prefixes and suffixes, polysemy, homonym, juncture, understanding as one word by two different words, and sound blending in a normal speed of connected speech. Bearing those in mind I taught Suwon University freshmen video English with the mixed idea of Peterson's bottom-up and top-down methods putting in a meaningful context with thought group rather than word to word understanding. As a consequence, their errors come: prepositions, conjunctions, unstressed prefixes and suffixes, -ing from the present progressives and so forth. Assignments to have students transcribe the TV commercials and the names of reporters or Korean related news from English broadcastings are of use and help.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.399-410
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• 2020

Detecting visual relationships in an image is important in an image understanding task. It enables higher image understanding tasks, that is, predicting the next scene and understanding what occurs in an image. A visual relationship comprises of a subject, a predicate, and an object, and is related to visual, language, and spatial cues. The predicate explains the relationship between the subject and object and can be categorized into different categories such as prepositions and verbs. A large visual gap exists although the visual relationship is included in the same predicate. This study improves upon a previous study (that uses language cues using two losses) and a spatial cue (that only includes individual information) by adding relative information on the subject and object of the extant study. The architectural limitation is demonstrated and is overcome to detect all zero-shot visual relationships. A new problem is discovered, and an explanation of how it decreases performance is provided. The experiment is conducted on the VRD and VG datasets and a significant improvement over previous results is obtained.