The Morphology-Syntax-Semantics Interaction in Korean Children’s Production of Conjugated Predicates

Abstract

Despite the cumulative literature on the Korean verb conjugation (or agglutination) (H. Im 1998, inter alia), there is virtually no study that has examined the distribution of conjugated predicates in Korean speakers’ speech production. On the other hand, this study investigates the determining factors for Korean children’s production of conjugated predicates. For this, we elicited narratives from 21 Korean children from 4;7 to 12;4 (Mean=8;8), extracted 1,236 predicate tokens from the transcripts, and cross-classified the usage types in terms of four categorical variables: morphological class, (morpho-)syntactic conjugation, semantic class, and age. Results from the log-linear regression analysis indicate no difference in the use of conjugated predicates among different age groups. Most of all, the interaction between morphology and semantics and the main effect of conjugation accurately predict the distribution of specific predicate forms in the speech production. The overall finding suggests that Korean children acquire the grammar of predicate conjugation before age 4, and that conjugation itself does not interact with other components of grammar.