Kim, Dongmin. 2014. Acquisition of Korean Non-terminal Suffix -ess- in the Conjunctive Clauses: For English Learners of Korean. Language Information. Volume 19. 33-56. This paper aims to investigate the acquisition of Korean non-terminal suffix -ess- in conjunctive clauses with a view to finding how interlanguage tense/aspect morphology is acquired by Korean second language (KSL) learners. Korean connectives agglutinate to the medial verb and tense-aspect-modality (TAM) marking occurs in between the two: connectives and medial verbs. The point, for this paper, is the fact that TAM suffixation is deficient because it varies in the presence/absence of TAM elements depending on the connectives. For this research I categorized the connectives into three types depending on the temporalities when the obligatory past or perfective contexts are given: 1) that never take -ess-, 2) that unconditionally take -ess-, 3) that selectively take -ess-. Thirty six English speakers between the ages of 18 and 27 years participated in the study. For collection of data, written questionnaire acceptability judgment task was used. The task included both 24 target items and 24 distracter items. -ese and -lyeko was easy for most participants. By contrast, -taka and -umyen shows low accuracy rates. In terms of the connectives including -nuntey and -ciman that unconditionally take the suffix, the scores was located between the two types. The results suggest that the learners perceive the suffix -ess- as a homogeneous past tense marker and they memorized the use of -ess- as a declarative knowledge.
Key words: 시제 상 습득(tense aspect acquisition), 연결어미(connective), 접속문(conjunctive sentences)