Why IS 'be' appear there?: Topic marker vs. underdeveloped functional category

Korean learners who learn English as a foreign language tend to use the verb be excessively in the initial stage of acquisition. Traditionally, there have been two opposing explanations about these errors. The first one is "topic marker view" (Ahn, 2003) and the other is "functional category view" (Yang, 2001). I carried out a corpus study using a learner corpus called KELC to examine which view explains the phenomenon more plausibly. After checking 1,235 error sentences I conclude that the errors are not explained by a sole reason. Instead, I suggest that the errors involve both the language transfer effect that is due to the topic prominence of Korean and the underdeveloped functional categories appearing in learners' developmental stages. (Kyungpook National University)