The Acquisition and Interpretation of English Telicity by Korean Speakers

This paper examines Korean speakers' knowledge of telicity in English and, precisely, whether they are aware that entire predicates pertain to telicity computation and that the semantic contribution of elements attached under VP to telicity depends on their endpoint specification. These questions are explored by Korean speakers' telicity interpretation of three constructions: (i) an activity plus a locative PP, (ii) an activity plus a goal PP, and (iii) an activity plus a direct object. They contrast in terms of telicity: the first construction is atelic while the other two are telic. The results show that Korean learners are largely able to differentiate the telic from the atelic interpretation. Interestingly, intermediate learners recognized the telic reading of the third construction but not of the second one. It is argued that this discrepancy is best explained by L1-transfer. Unlike the third construction, which involves matched semantics and syntax, the second construction is associated with matched semantics but with mismatched syntax between Korean and English−viz. the difference in the syntactic representations of the construction.