This study explores the characteristics of English Resultative constructions and investigates Korean learners’ understanding of them along with native English speakers’ intuition data, focusing on the most salient syntactic regularity, DOR and the secondary predicate restrictions. The experiments were designed as follows. For the control group, 32 adult native English speakers participated in the production task of English resultatives and the grammaticality judgement task which consisted of four types of resultatives and XP-Adverb sentences. For the experimental group, 57 Korean EFL learners at two different levels participated in the study: 30 graduate students for the advanced group; 27 second year high school students for the intermediate group. The result showed Korean learners’ unfamiliarity of the resultative sentences: the lack of the knowledge of DOR and semantic constraints on the resultative predicate, XP. Accordingly, pedagogical implications are discussed - especially the necessity of paying attention to the dual nature of resultatives: syntactic regularity and semantic arbitrariness.
(0)
(0)