Eunjeong Oh. 2017. Korean Speakers’ Aspectual Choice in English: Influence from Telicity, Transitivity, and Subject Animacy. Language Information. Volume 24. 05-28. Semantic features, telicity, transitivity, subject animacy, have been argued to be intimately linked to grammatical aspect and thus, influence speakers’ choice between perfective and imperfective aspect. Precisely, the values of atelic, intransitive, and animate subject are argued to increase imperfective choices relative to the other value of that factor. The goal of this study is to examine Korean speakers’ sensitivity to such links between each of the three features and grammatical aspect in English. The results found that telicity and subject animacy, but not transitivity, significantly influence Korean speakers’ aspectual choices, and that telicity is a stronger predictor of Korean speakers’ choices than subject animacy. The unexpected result with transitivity was accounted for by invoking the inherent defect in the link between transitivity and grammatical aspect through telicity and the syntactically grounded nature of the link. We also considered and argued against two alternatives: frequency-based and L1-transfer based accounts. Each of the accounts is insufficient to account for the whole of the experimental data.
Key words: Grammatical Aspect, Telicity, Transitivity, Subject Animacy, Acceptability Judgment, Perfective/imperfective Distinction.