Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Advances in Korean psycholinguistics
- Part I Language acquisition
- 1 Acquisition of the subject and topic nominals and markers in the spontaneous speech of young children in Korean
- 2 The acquisition of argument structure and transitivity in Korean: a discourse-functional approach
- 3 Acquisition of case markers and grammatical functions
- 4 Do Korean children acquire verbs earlier than nouns?
- 5 The acquisition of the placement of the verb in the clause structure of Korean
- 6 Learning locative verb syntax: a crosslinguistic experimental study
- 7 Language-specific spatial semantics and cognition: developmental patterns in English and Korean
- 8 Acquisition of negation in Korean
- 9 The acquisition of Korean numeral classifiers
- 10 Acquisition of Korean reflexive anaphora
- 11 The Korean relative clause: issues of processing and acquisition
- 12 The accessibility hierarchy in Korean: head-external and head-internal relative clauses
- 13 Development of functional categories in child Korean
- 14 The acquisition of modality
- 15 The syntax of overmarking and kes in child Korean
- 16 Events in passive development
- 17 Universal quantification in child grammar
- 18 Acquisition of prosody in Korean
- 19 Korean as a heritage language
- 20 Maturational effects on L2 acquisition
- 21 L2 acquisition of English articles by Korean speakers
- 22 The acquisition of wanna contraction by adult Korean learners of English
- 23 Phonological abilities of Korean–English bilinguals
- 24 Parameters on languages in contact: an altered view of codeswitching
- 25 Influence of socio-psychological categories in bilingual interaction
- 26 Ontological concept versus shape in word learning from a crosslinguistic point of view
- 27 Notes on Korean Sign Language
- Part II Language processing
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
2 - The acquisition of argument structure and transitivity in Korean: a discourse-functional approach
from Part I - Language acquisition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Advances in Korean psycholinguistics
- Part I Language acquisition
- 1 Acquisition of the subject and topic nominals and markers in the spontaneous speech of young children in Korean
- 2 The acquisition of argument structure and transitivity in Korean: a discourse-functional approach
- 3 Acquisition of case markers and grammatical functions
- 4 Do Korean children acquire verbs earlier than nouns?
- 5 The acquisition of the placement of the verb in the clause structure of Korean
- 6 Learning locative verb syntax: a crosslinguistic experimental study
- 7 Language-specific spatial semantics and cognition: developmental patterns in English and Korean
- 8 Acquisition of negation in Korean
- 9 The acquisition of Korean numeral classifiers
- 10 Acquisition of Korean reflexive anaphora
- 11 The Korean relative clause: issues of processing and acquisition
- 12 The accessibility hierarchy in Korean: head-external and head-internal relative clauses
- 13 Development of functional categories in child Korean
- 14 The acquisition of modality
- 15 The syntax of overmarking and kes in child Korean
- 16 Events in passive development
- 17 Universal quantification in child grammar
- 18 Acquisition of prosody in Korean
- 19 Korean as a heritage language
- 20 Maturational effects on L2 acquisition
- 21 L2 acquisition of English articles by Korean speakers
- 22 The acquisition of wanna contraction by adult Korean learners of English
- 23 Phonological abilities of Korean–English bilinguals
- 24 Parameters on languages in contact: an altered view of codeswitching
- 25 Influence of socio-psychological categories in bilingual interaction
- 26 Ontological concept versus shape in word learning from a crosslinguistic point of view
- 27 Notes on Korean Sign Language
- Part II Language processing
- References
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
Introduction
The acquisition of argument structure and transitivity has been a major area of research in first language acquisition. Argument structure is generally analyzed in terms of the semantic and syntactic relations that hold between a verb and its core arguments at the lexical and clausal levels. At the lexical level, a transitive verb can be defined empirically as one that is usually used with two core arguments, prototypically an agent acting upon a patient. At the clausal level, the grammar of transitivity encompasses the devices (e.g. word order, casemarking and verbal affixes) that are involved in treating the two core arguments as belonging to particular grammatical categories, such as subject and object. While most linguistic analyses of argument structure and transitivity have focused on the levels of lexicon and clause, my work on the acquisition of Korean is based on the assumption that a full understanding of argument structure requires consideration of an additional level, namely, discourse.
The discourse-functional approach that I have pursued draws upon almost three decades of functionally and typologically oriented research on grammar that uses discourse data – transcriptions of audio- or video-taped interactions of language use – as the basis for analyzing grammatical systems and formulating grammatical theory (e.g. Chafe, 1994; Du Bois, 1987, Givón, 1979). The most basic assumption of this approach is that the structure of grammars is shaped by the communicative pressures and cognitive limitations involved in language use.
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- The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics , pp. 34 - 49Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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