반사실성 구문 ‘-었어야 했다’ 의미 인식 연구: 일본어·중국어 모어 한국어 학습자를 대상으로 = A Study on the Interpretation of the Korean Counterfactual Construction ‘-eoss-eoya haetda’ by L1 Japanese and Chinese Learners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examines how L1 Japanese and Chinese learners of Korean interpret the counterfactual construction ‘-eoss-eoya haetda’, which expresses unfulfilled obligation and the speaker’s regret. This construction combines tense and modality to form a high-level semantic function, yet it is rarely addressed as an explicit instructional target in Korean language education. A True-Value Judgment Task was administered to three groups: 30 native Korean speakers, 43 L1 Japanese learners, and 46 L1 Chinese learners. The results showed that Japanese learners, whose L1 contains morphologically similar counterfactual forms, demonstrated high accuracy and consistent interpretation patterns, closely resembling native speakers. In contrast, Chinese learners, whose L1 lacks equivalent grammatical structures, showed lower accuracy and greater individual variation. These findings indicate that morphological congruency between learners’ L1 and Korean plays a significant role in acquiring tense–modality constructions expressing counterfactuality. The study highlights the pedagogical need to explicitly teach such constructions inKorean L2 instruction, particularly for learners whose L1s do not morphologically encode counterfactual meaning.