Lee, Sang-Geun & Song, Sanghoun. 2017. An Experimental Study on Korean EFL Students’ Acceptability Judgment on Korean Sentences. Language Information. Volume 24. 29-50. The traditional generative grammarians have believed that the linguistic competence of the so-called ideal language user remains constant and hence provides quite a stable basis for linguistic theories. This study, however, adopts a formal experimental method to focus on the difference/deviation in language judgment between two language groups, Korean EFL students and non-EFL students, and explore inter-speaker variations of the same language society. Specifically, exploiting the 24 years’ Korean data of the linguistics journal Studies in Generative Grammar as experiment sentences, this study shows there is language attrition on the side of Korean EFL students. We claim that sociolinguistic factors are responsible for such inter-speaker variations, and that the most influential grammatical phenomenon that negatively interferes in the Korean grammar of Korean EFL students, is the theory of Case. The results of this study imply that inter-speaker variations should be reconsidered as meaningful source for a broader study of language.
Key words: Acceptability Judgment, EFL, Experimental Syntax, Informal Method, Intuition, Language Attrition, Sociolinguistics, Variation.