한국어 문장의 주제와 초점 구조 습득

Acquisition of the structures of Korean sentential topic and focus

Many learners and teachers felt difficult to learn and teach the structure of Korean particle (n)un and i/ka. In this article, we assume that the meanings of (n)un are ‘topic’ and ‘contrast’, and the meanings of i/ka are ‘focus’ and ‘neutral’. The meanings of these particles have different syntactic structures and phonological prominences. However, the contrastive (n)un and the focal i/ka have similar structures in Korean language. Four different proficiency groups of learners of Korean as a Second Language were enrolled in a multiple choice cloze test and an acceptability judgement test. These tests were designed to examine systematic development of learner languages in the acquisition of i/ka and (n)un. The results showed that the developmental sequences of Korean particles i/ka and (n)un were the neutral i/ka, the focal i/ka, topical (n)un, and contrastive (n)un in this order. Because of the structural similarities, contrastive (n)un and the focal i/ka were hard to be acquired by the learners. According to these results, the study suggests that the Korean language teaching can be more effective if the teaching method followed these developmental patterns of the learners.