The acquisition of L2 English agreement by L1 Korean speakers & its theoretical implications for SLA

한국어 화자의 영어 일치소 습득과 그 이론적 함축성

This paper aims at showing firstly, that the parameterized Universal Grammar is also accessible in second language acquisition based on the data found in the English Agreement acquisition by Korean speakers and secondly, that the theoretical claim that the acquisition of Agreement is related to the Subject Drop phenomenon can be supported by the second language acquisition data. The functional category AGRP which is crucial here can be parameterized according to its features with Korean of - Agr and English of + Agr. Two groups of 40 each were tested and the result shows that the parameter resetting is possible in terms of the Agreement feature. In addition to Agreement test, three more tests for the distribution of Subject Drop, Subject Raising and NPI (Negative Polarity Items) were conducted in order to find the correlation among those grammatical phenomena. The result is that the acquisition of Agreement and the Subject Drop possibility are correlated but that they are not related to the obligatory Subject Raising process. Finally, NPI distribution test which is supposedly related to the Subject Raising turned out to carry little information since the average grades from both groups were very low.