초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Second language acquisition of plural marking on English nouns is recognized as causing persistent difficulty for Korean EFL learners. This learning difficulty has often been attributed to the morphosyntactic and semantic differences between Korean and English nouns, such as optional vs. obligatory plural marking and cross-linguistic mismatches in the countability of nouns. This study was intended to add to the existing literature by examining whether and how Korean EFL learners’ plural marking on English nouns is modulated by animacy and abstractness, which are known to constrain the distribution of the Korean plural morpheme –tul. To that end, a large Korean EFL learner corpus (Yonsei English Learner Corpus) was analyzed with regards to how consistently nouns were marked as plural when preceded by one of the three count quantifiers: many, (a) few, and several. The nouns were categorized into three types based on what they denote: human beings (e.g., teacher), concrete inanimate objects (e.g., picture), and abstract concepts (e.g., problem). The results showed that Korean learners had greater difficulty in overt plural marking of abstract nouns relative to either human or inanimate object nouns, with the latter two categories showing a similar pattern. Pedagogical and theoretical implications can be drawn from the findings.
