earticle

영어

This paper investigates the difference in the distributional patterns of four types of adverbs between native speakers and Korean EFL learners. An on-line grammaticality judgment task constructed based on the syntactic analysis for adverb placement was administered to 58 college students in Korea and 39 native speakers. Following Cinque (1999), we assume that adverbs are base-generated in the specifier of hierarchically ordered functional heads, and the data analysis supports the proposal. The findings in this study present both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Firstly, the data of native speakers on adverb placement support Cinque’s proposal. The positions above T were rated high for the high adverbs, such as evaluative and epistemic adverbs, and the lower positions below T were rated high for the low adverbs, such as frequency/habitual and manner adverbs. Secondly, unlike the native speakers, the Korean EFL learners did not tend to differentiate adverb types. Regardless of the adverb classes, they preferred sentence-marginal positions. Thirdly, although the complete developmental picture was not captured in this study, it is suggested that as learners advanced to higher proficiency level, they converge with native speakers judgments in adverb distribution patterns.