An Experimental Investigation of Korean Speakers’ Interpretation of Degree Achievements in English*

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

66, 211-236. This experimental study examined the interpretation of aspectual properties of degree achievements (in short, DAs) in English among 60 Korean and 57 English speakers to address the role of L1 transfer and context. DAs display similar aspectual properties in English and Korean; in both, DAs derived from closed-scale adjectives behave telically whereas DAs derived from open-scale adjectives behave atelically. However, there is one important difference. Unlike English, the closed-scale DAs in Korean can be interpreted atelically when favored by context. The result of the study showed that Korean intermediate learners largely failed to make the distinction between the two types of DAs, which manifested that L1 transfer preempts shared semantics of DAs. This result challenges the wholesale transfer view in the L2. Controls made the distinction but exhibited some variability where there is a room for pragmatics to work. This suggests that aspectual properties of DAs cannot be fully determined by semantics, but rather by the interaction between semantic and pragmatic factors.