Preposition Pied-piping, Stranding, Doubling, & Dropping in Korean EFL Learners’ Interlanguage

This study investigates Korean EFL learners’ interlanguage in the course of the acquisition of preposition stranding and pied-piping in syntactic contexts such as relative clauses and wh-questions with respect to preposition placement. An acceptability judgment task was conducted with Korean EFL learners at different proficiency levels in order to look at the developmental path and the effects of various factors such as clause types, the argumenthood of prepositional phrases, and the interpretability of prepositions. The results of the experiment showed that while preposition dropping and doubling were attested in learners’ interlanguage, their acceptance rates decreased as learners’ general English proficiency increases. While preposition doubling was rejected at an early stage, preposition dropping gradually decreased, which exhibited an interesting contrast with the native speakers‘ judgment.