earticle

영어

This study aims to investigate how Korean learners process anaphors(reflexives or pronouns) in picture noun phrases through two experiments: an offline acceptability judgment task and an online self-paced reading task. The results of the two experiments show that Korean learners’ processing of anaphors in picture noun phrases with and without possessors(e.g. Peter’s picture of him/himself, a picture of him/himself) was not strongly influenced by binding constraints. Especially, the processing of reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrases with possessors did not follow complementary distribution. This indicates a discrepancy between linguistic theory and actual human usage. Therefore, these findings suggest that reflexives in picture noun phrases, regardless of the presence of a possessor, are exempt reflexives rather than structural reflexives. Additionally, not only the syntactic aspect but also the semantic and pragmatic aspects should be considered to reveal the hidden referential properties of anaphors in picture noun phrases.