• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.6
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• pp.199-217
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• 2000

Relative pronoun that is one of the important relative pronouns but we have an impression that its scope of use has been somewhat narrowed. In the light of history of relative pronouns relative pronoun toot has the longest history of all relative pronouns and it was widely used even in Middle English and early Modem English. On The other hand, we can see that the relative use of that has been gradually weakened as the relative pronouns who and which has expanded their scope of use. It is quite natural that the scope of use of toot as a relative pronoun has been narrowed as who is mainly used in referring to person and which is mainly used in referring to things. And we can note that that is used only in restrictive clauses, not in nonrestrictive clauses, for that has a strong characteristics of relative conjunction in comparing with who and which. That as a relative pronoun still has its own weight because it can take an antecedent referring to person and thing. In particular, it is general tendency that who is used more frequently than that in the case of referring that it is not adequate for that to refer to things. In contrast, who has an advantage over that because the former originally refers only to person.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.6
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• pp.35-47
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• 2000

This study questions the validity of Crosslinguistic Influence (CLI) in EFL Learning. A ten-minute grammaticality judgement test involving resumptive pronouns in English relative clauses was given to 15 female subjects. The research results, which were analysed in terns of language transfer and universalist arguments, support the existence of a universal process that guides L2 learning, and some common developmental patterns between the two processes of L1 and L2 learning. Hence, the universalist view should be given at least equal Weight as the CLI approach.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.33
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• pp.407-459
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• 2013

The paper pragmatically analyzes ellipsis in Russian and Polish colloquial and informal texts. The famous Polish writer Sławomir $Mro{\dot{z}}ek^{\prime}s$ "Exit to the South", written in Polish and Russian is used as a material for the analysis. Russian and Polish ellipsis in colloquial and informal texts have in common that the givenness and subjecthood of the elliptical co-referent play a crucial role. However, the ellipsis in two languages also has differences in many ways. Above all, in the Polish texts of colloquial and informal style, a theme is likely to be elliptical and the coreferential relation reaches to an extra-sentential antecedent, while the ellipsis in analysed Russian texts in most cases requires coordinate, subordinate or relative clauses, and the elliptical co-referent tends to have an intra-sentential antecedent. The ellipsis of the theme-subject is unmarked in Polish, where every verbal form has an ending denoting person. Unlike formal style which often allows explicit noun subject, Polish text of colloquial and informal style prefer null form of the subject in most cases. If Polish sentences have explicit theme-subjects, they disambiguate intervening and main themes, and indicate the contrast, the focus, the introduction of new narratives or the change of speaker's point of view. Sometimes direct speeches and deictic pronouns also need explicit theme-subjects in Polish sentences. On the other hand, the ellipsis of the theme-subject is marked in Russian even in colloquial and informal texts. The theme-subject can be deleted in Russian colloquial and informal texts, if the subject is a form of the first or the second person, or if the aspect and the tense of the antecedent sentence's verb are the same as those of the given sentence's verb and both the antecedent and the coreferential word have the nominative case.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.405-428
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• 1990

Language has a social function to communicate information. Linguists have gradually paid their attention to the function of language since the nineteen sixties, especially to the relationship of form, meaning and the function. The relationship could be more clearly grasped through disciyrse-based analysis than through sentence-based analysis. Many researches were centered on the discourse functional notion of topic. In the early 1970's the subject was defined as the grammatiocalized topic the topic as a discrete single constituent of the clause. In the late 1970's several lingusts including Givon suggerted that the topic was not an atomic, disctete entity, and that the clause could have more than one topic. The purpose of the present study is, following Givon, to study grammatical coding devices of topic and to measure the relative topic continuity/discontinuity of participant argu, ents in Korean narratives. By so doing, I would like to shed some light on effective ways of communicating information. The grammatical coding devices analyzed are the following eight structures: zero-anaphora, personal pronous, demonstrative pronouns, names, noun phrases following demonstratives, noun phrases following possessives, definite noun phrases and indefinite referentials. The narrative studied for the count was taken from the KoreanCIA chief's Testiomny:Revolution and Idol by Hyung Wook Kim. It was chosen because it was assumed that Kim's purpose in the novel was to tell a true story, which would not distort the natural use of language for literary effect. The measures taken in the analysis wre those of 'lookback', 'persistence', ambiguity'. The first of these, 'lookback', is a measure of the size of gap between the previous occurrence of a referent and its current occurence in the clause. The meausure of persistence, which is a measure of the speaker's topocal intent, reflects the topic's importance in the discourse. The third measure is a measure of ambiguity. This is necessary for assessing the disruptive effects that other topics within five previous clauses may have on topic identification. The more other topics are present within five previous clauses, the more difficult is the task of correct identification of a topic. The results of the present study show that the humanness of entities is the most powerful factior in topic continutiy in narrative discourse. The semantic roles of human arguments in narrative discourse tend to be agents or experiences. Since agents and experiences have high topicality in discourse, human entities clearly become clausal or discoursal topics. The results also show that the grammatical devices signal varying degrees of topic continuity discontinuity in continuous discourse. The more continuous a topic argument is, the less it is coded. For example, personal pronouns have the most continutiy and indefinite referentials have the least continutiy. The study strongly shows that topic continuity discontinutiy is controlled not only by grammatical devices available in the language but by socio-cultural factors and writer's intentions.