• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2012

This study investigated the lexical access processing of inflected Korean verbs in the mental lexicon. In Korean, verbs can be classified into two main types of inflections, which are regular and irregular inflections, which can be further divided into three types of regular inflections and two types of irregular inflections. A masked priming lexical decision task was used and the priming effects were compared. Experiments were carried out using the five different types of verbal inflections in Korean: (1) No change-regularity (regular verbs with no orthographical or phonological changes), (2) Phonological change-regularity (regular verbs with phonological changes to the stem only), (3) Orthographical change-regularity (regular verbs that only undergo orthographical changes), (4) Stem change-irregularity (the stem is omitted or alternated with the other phoneme of the stem in irregular verbs), (5) Ending change-irregularity (irregular verbs with changes in the endings by phoneme substitution). The first three types are regarded as regular verbal inflections whereas the latter two types are regarded as irregular verbal inflections. The infinitive forms of the verb were presented as target words and three different conditions were presented as prime words. The three conditions included regular verbal inflection, irregular verbal inflection, and a control condition in which morphologically and semantically unrelated primes were presented. In addition, different stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were manipulated (43ms, 72ms, 230ms) to examine the time frame of the morphological decomposition process in word recognition. The results revealed that there were significant priming effects in all three SOAs across conditions. Hence, there was no significant differences in priming effects between regular and irregular verbal inflection conditions. This may suggest that Korean verb processing does not adopt different processing routes for regular and irregular inflections, which can also be an indication of earlier morphological information processing for Korean verbs.

• Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.117-149
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• 2004

The paper is to argue against the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis of Old English, according to which finite verbs invariably undergo movement into a clause-final T within subordinate clauses and reach the functional head C within main clauses. The asymmetric CP-V2 analysis, first of all, faces difficulty in explaining a wide range of post-verbal elements within subordinate clauses. To resolve the problem, the analysis has to abandon the obligatoriness of V-to-T movement or introduce various types of extraposition whose status is dubious as a legitimate syntactic operation. Obligatory V-to-T movement in Old English lacks conceptual justification as well. Crosslinguistic evidence reveals that morphological richness in verbal inflection cannot entail overt verb movement. Moreover, the operation is always string-vacuous under the asymmetric CP- V2 analysis and has no effect at the interfaces, in violation of the principle of economy. The distribution of Old English finite verbs in main clauses also undermines the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis. Conceptually speaking, a proper syntactic trigger cannot be confirmed to motivate obligatory verb movement to C. The operation not only gets little support from nominative Case marking, the distribution of expletives, or complementizer agreement but also requires the unconvincing stipulation that expletives as well as sentence-initial subjects result from string-vacuous topicalization. Finally, textual evidence testifies that Old English sometimes permits non-V2 ordering patterns, many of which remain unexplained under the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis.

• 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.