Abstract
English articles mark the definiteness of co-occurring noun phrases (NPs), which in turn correlates with the information status of the referents described by the NPs (e.g., Clifton & Frazier, 2004). Previous studies show that the information given in the discourse tends to be encoded earlier in an utterance than the information to be newly introduced (e.g., Arnold, Wasow, Losongco, & Ginstrom, 2000). The present study investigates an aspect of the knowledge that adult Korean learners of English have of the English articles by testing their sensitivity to the link between the definiteness of NPs and the NP’s preferred order in a sentence. Twenty-four learners of English read double object (DO) and prepositional object (PO) constructions on a word-by-word basis, in which the two postverbal NPs were contrasted in definiteness by switching the and a (e.g., The pitcher showed the boy a ball, The pitcher showed a boy the ball; The pitcher showed the ball to a boy, The pitcher showed a ball to the boy). The results show that the participants read the definite?indefinite post-verbal NP sequences more rapidly than indefinite?definite sequences in the DO constructions but not in the PO constructions, which indicates their sensitivity to the given-before-new preference in the discourse informational organization as well as to its interaction with syntactic alternation. The findings are discussed in terms of L2 acquisition and instruction of English articles.
Published Version
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