• 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.

• Language and Information
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.177-213
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• 1998

conflicting criterial used in identifying words have called the lexical integrity principle into question. That is, cases where the morphological word does not coincide with the syntactic word have notivated the syntactic view of word derivation, as pointed out by Bresnan and Mchombo(1995). Further, the implicit desire to make the clausal structure of Korean parallel to those posited for English(Chomsky 1991) and French(Pollock 1989) has also led most of the current literature on Korean morphology to claim that Korean verbal inflections head their own functional projections such as AgrP, TP, and MP im syntax. In this paper, I will first argue against such a syntactic view. After reviewing some basic properties of Korean verbal inflections, I will show that the evidence from mismatch phenomena supports the lexical integrity principle over the head-movement theories of word derivation. Then, I will propose a theory of lexical grammar which maintains the lexical integrity principle while retaining the effects of functional projections and syntactic movement.

• 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.