This study explores whether the ability to process grammatical evidentiality is compromised in older adults speaking Turkish and Korean, two languages that grammatically encode evidentiality. Building on previous research that suggests cognitive demands associated with language structures may reduce processing capacity in older adults, we conducted self-paced reading experiments using sentence contexts involving grammatical evidentials. We tested adult groups of young (N = 44, ages 19–27) and older (N = 37, ages 48–70) speakers of Korean and young (N = 31, ages 18–31) and older (N = 42, ages 50–85) speakers of Turkish. The results indicate that both language groups rated mismatched evidential verb forms as unacceptable, with Turkish speakers more likely to interpret mismatches as acceptable than Korean speakers. Notably, older Korean adults exhibited longer reading times (RTs) for direct evidential mismatches, while older Turkish adults showed longer RTs for indirect evidential verbs, suggesting age-related disruptions in processing. The findings only partially support the hypothesis that predicts grammatical processing differences in older compared to younger adults.

Cross-linguistically, the existence of ‘double case’ configurations (e.g., nom-subject and nom-object) presents an empirical challenge to theories of case where anti-identity, or distinctness between two NPs, plays a key role (e.g., Yip, Maling & Jackendoff 1987). This study investigates the factors that influence the distribution of nominative object constructions in Korean. In a novel acceptability judgment experiment, we find that sentences with nom-objects are rated less acceptable than those with acc-objects. In a corpus survey, sentences with nom-objects commonly have topic-marked subjects. We propose the Morphological-Thematic-Grammatical (MTG) Alignment Hypothesis, which posits that sentences are maximally acceptable when there is maximal alignment between morphological case marking, thematic role, and grammatical function. In nom-acc constructions, this alignment is achieved because the highest-ranked subject (Keenan & Comrie 1977) is marked with highest-ranked nominative case (Otsuka 2006) and functions as a higher-ranked agent or experiencer. The lower-ranked object, meanwhile, has lower-ranked accusative case and functions as a lower-ranked patient. In contrast, nom-nom (and dat-nom) constructions fail to achieve this alignment. Our analysis treats the relevant constraints (e.g., distinctness, alignment) as interacting with each other to produce cumulative effects on acceptability.

This article examines representations of the Modern English Speaker of Korean (MESK) in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), as lexicographers listened to and documented the language of this figure over the past century. I show that, until the early twenty-first century, the most salient type of MESK was the Koreanist, a white, masculine expert on and translator of Korean, the language of a racial other. By contrast, more recent Korean entries, influenced by the global spread of hallyu, have invoked the Korea Fan, a figure that potentially unsettles longstanding ideologies of language, race, and gender. I argue, however, that the dictionary’s techniques of linguistic regimentation continue to represent the MESK, even when expressing Korean fandom, as fundamentally aligned with the Koreanist.

Object relatives (ORs) have been reported to cause heavier processing loads than subject relatives (SRs) in both pre- and postnominal position (prenominal relatives: Miyamoto & Nakamura 2003, Kwon 2008, Ueno & Garnsey 2008; postnominal relatives: King & Just 1991, King & Kutas 1995, Traxler et al. 2002). In this article, we report the results of two eye-tracking studies of Korean prenominal relative clauses that confirm a processing advantage for subject relatives both with and without supporting context. These results are shown to be compatible with accounts involving the accessibility hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977), phrase-structural complexity (O'Grady 1997), and probabilistic structural disambiguation (Mitchell et al. 1995, Hale 2006), partially compatible with similarity-based interference (Gordon et al. 2001), but incompatible with linear/temporal analyses of filler-gap dependencies (Gibson 1998, 2000, Lewis & Vasishth 2005, Lewis et al. 2006).

This article presents the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation and gestural overlap at word boundaries in Korean and Korean-accented English. Twelve speakers of Seoul Korean recorded phrases containing obstruent#nasal and obstruent#obstruent sequences in both Korean and English. Nasalization of the word-final obstruent, predicted by the rules of Korean phonology, occurred in 93% of obstruent#nasal sequences in Korean and in 32% of such sequences in Korean-accented English, a rate of application higher than that reported in most other studies of external sandhi alternations in nonnative speech. Acoustic analysis found categorical nasalization in the L1 Korean productions, but both categorical and gradient nasalization, along with a high degree of inter- and intraspeaker variation, in the L2 English productions. For a subset of speakers, there was a significant correlation between quantitative measures of nasalization in English and measures of consonant overlap in the English obstruent#obstruent sequences. An analysis in terms of articulatory gestures and the coupled-oscillator model of speech planning is supported. The analysis is based on the ARTICULATORY PHONOLOGY model (Browman & Goldstein 1990a,b, 1992, 2000, Goldstein et al. 2006), though with modifications. Implications for phonetic and phonological representations, and for speech planning in both L1 and L2, are explored.

In this article, we investigate the semiotic practices of Filipino K-pop fans (KpopStans) who supported the 2022 presidential bid of former Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo. Through digital ethnography, we analyze the ways in which fans entextualized and resemiotized signifiers of K-pop (e.g., lyrics, imagery, fancams) to create hybrid political messages that translated familiar fandom aesthetics into forms of electoral participation. We argue these practices constitute “civic stanning”—enactments of fan-based citizenship that leverage the cultural resonance of K-pop to build solidarities around Robredo, exercise political agency, promote values of conviviality and progress, and navigate the restrictive political climate of the Philippines. The study highlights the role of popular culture in mediating transnational flows and shaping emergent modes of political activism.

Subject relative (SR) clauses have a reliable processing advantage in VO languages like English in which relative clauses (RCs) follow the head noun. The question is whether this is also routinely true in OV languages like Japanese and Korean, in which RCs precede the head noun. We conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study of Korean RCs to test whether the SR advantage manifests in brain responses, and to tease apart the typological factors that might contribute to these responses. Our results suggest that brain responses to RCs are remarkably similar in VO and OV languages. Our results also suggest that the marking of the right edge of the RC in Chinese (Yang et al. 2010) and Korean and the absence of such marking in Japanese (Ueno & Garnsey 2008) affect the response to the following head noun. The consistent SR advantage found in ERP studies lends further support to a universal subject preference in the processing of relative clauses.

We reexamine the status of the coordinate structure constraint (CSC; Ross 1967) by drawing on evidence from Japanese and Korean. Contrary to the standard view that the CSC is a syntactic constraint, the empirical patterns from the two languages show that it should instead be viewed as a pragmatic principle. We propose a pragmatic analysis by building on and extending a previous proposal by Kehler (2002). Examining the Japanese and Korean data turns out to be vital in the comparison of the syntactic and pragmatic approaches, since the syntactic differences between the relevant constructions in the two languages and their counterparts in English crucially distinguish the predictions of the two approaches.

This article investigates the role of situational context in differential case marking. Evidence from conversation data in Korean demonstrates that caseless subjects are predominantly found in event-reporting clauses that have an agent directly identifiable in the here and now, while case-marked subjects are not similarly restricted. Based on this evidence, I propose a new account of differential subject marking in terms of an efficiency principle of negative correlation between length/complexity and cue reliability. I argue that the association of caseless subjects with seemingly unrelated features such as grounding in the here and now, nonstativity, and definiteness follows from speakers' efficient use of case marking motivated by the availability of strong situational cues to the intended role interpretation of a subject referent.

Linguistic context supports children’s verb learning. For example, upon hearing “the boy is pilking,” children can infer that the novel verb pilk names an action that a boy (rather than a girl) engages in. However, more information, such as a modified subject (e.g. “the tall boy is pilking”), could hinder rather than aid due to increased processing load, as suggested by a previous study with English-learning toddlers (He et al., 2020, Language Learning and Development 16, 22–42). In the current study, we found that Korean-learning preschoolers also experienced difficulty when the verb appeared with a modified subject compared to an unmodified one; this difficulty persisted across three situational contexts, even when the additional information was necessary to identify the referent. Our findings, with a typologically different language and diverse contexts, provide cross-linguistic support for prior results in English, consistent with a conceptual replication of the idea that less information can sometimes be more beneficial for learning.

Thai and Korean have large inventories of adpositional particles, including source and goal markers. As reported in many languages, Thai and Korean adpositions also prominently exhibit the ‘goal-over-source asymmetry’ at multiple levels. This article supports this hypothesis on asymmetry from these two typologically and genealogically distinct languages. In both languages, goal markers far exceed source markers in number, confirming the hypothesis. Even among the allative-ablative-(locative) syncretic forms, the proportion of use for goal marking far exceeds that for source marking, again upholding the asymmetry hypothesis. The multiplicity of forms in the two polar categories is largely due to the stacking of multiple markers of (nearly-)synonymous adpositions as a strategy to reinforce meaning or to add finer shades of meaning. The multiplicity of forms is also due to frequent innovation of new forms, especially goal markers, in an effort to enhance expressivity and to entertain the desire for creativity. This is evident in the fact that the forms being innovated tend to carry more lexical content than older, fully grammaticalized forms, and thus carry more expressive potential. Drawing upon corpus data, this paper addresses the goal-over-source asymmetry in Korean and Thai from pragmatic and grammaticalization perspectives.

This paper investigates Korean nominal coordination, a distant conjunct of which is semantically incompatible with the subcategorizing verb in a sentence. This type of nominal coordination is supported by both corpus-based and experimental data. Such coordinations pose a challenge to previous approaches to coordination in the literature. Specifically, any theory directly linking the subcategorizing verb to such a distant conjunct encounters the issue of semantic incompatibility. To address this issue, based on Lee (2020), I propose associating the distant conjunct with a direct hypernym of the verb. While the primary focus is on conjunctive nominal coordinations, the hypothesis also extends to disjunctive nominal coordinations. This semantic taxonomy-based account is then formally implemented in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag 1994; Sag et al. 2003), adapting the generalized conjunction from Partee & Rooth (1983). Furthermore, I argue that this analysis can serve as a basis for explaining other related constructions in Korean.