Pragmatic Effects on Korean Speakers' Interpretations of English Reflexives

Abstract

This study investigates Korean EFL interpretations of English reflexives, especially under pragmatically biased context, and questions how solidly second language (L2) speakers retain their structure-based decisions on the interpretations of reflexives in comparison to those of native speaker control groups. It reports the result of a forced-choice task experiment which examined whether there is any difference among two native control groups and two Korean EFL groups with different proficiency levels (a Korean EFL student group and a Korean EFL teacher group) with respect to their (un)steady states of grammars of reflexive resolutions. The data indicates that pragmatic manipulation that leave structural conditions intact can radically alter the judgments of reflexive interpretations of L2 speakers and even affect those of English native speakers to a certain degree. This implies the primary sources for reflexive resolutions vary depending on proficiency levels -i.e., from that of native speakers to those of two L2 groups. This difference can be attributed to L1 transfer effects in that Korean employs different strategies for reflexive resolutions which heavily rely on pragmatic information and discourse factors (Kim 2000, Huang 2000). The results also favor the Shallow Structure Hypothesis of Clashen and Felser (2006): L2 learners rely more heavily on semantic and pragmatic cues than on syntactic cues to interpretation of complex sentences.