A Study on Korean Bridging Inferences Marked by Korean Demonstrative ‘ku’

Abstract

Bridging inferences (or references) are important in a variety of contexts since they are quite often unconsciously employed by people as one of the most efficient linguistic devices to establish coherence relations in discourse. The present study aims to explore the utilization of the anaphoric demonstrative ku by Korean speakers in the formation of bridging references. 252 occurrences of bridging references identified in 184 Korean argumentative essays were scrutinized and their distributions were compared with those of two other groups - English speakers (ESs) and Korean EFL learners (KEFLs) - which had been examined by Crosthwaite (2019). This study revealed that the implementation of anaphora is distinctively realized in typologically different languages, grammar-based and discourse-based, thus serving as a reminder of linguistic relativity. Furthermore, the study posited that L1 transfer occurred only restrictively in the Attribute category of bridging references among KEFLs. After all, our study provides insights into Korean speakers’ capacity to use contextual information to efficiently form and maintain coherent discourse, in comparison with English speakers’ and KEFL learners’.