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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 24, No. 0, pp.811-835
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2024
Received 18 Apr 2024 Revised 06 May 2024 Accepted 12 Aug 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.24..202408.811

Preposition Stranding and Pied-Piping in Wh-Relative Clauses by Korean EFL Learners: A Corpus-Based Study

Gunhee Ko
Department of English Language and Literature Ewha Womans University gunheeko@ewha.ac.kr


© 2024 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of preposition stranding (PS) and pied-piping (PiP) structures in English wh-relative clauses written by Korean learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL), a relatively underexplored topic in corpus research. This study uses the Test of English as a Foreign Language11 (TOEFL11) corpus, a learner corpus of nonnative English essays, and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) as a reference corpus. The study investigates the distribution of PS and PiP structures, the variation across different proficiency levels, and the impact of the three independent variables—(i) the syntactic dependency between verbs and prepositional phrases, (ii) the semantic dependency between verbs and prepositions, and (iii) the restrictiveness of wh-relative clauses. The findings indicated that Korean EFL learners used PS more frequently than PiP structures, whereas native English speakers showed the opposite trend. The findings also highlighted that the null-preposition phenomenon was prevalent across all proficiency levels, while PS was significantly more frequent than PiP in the lower-intermediate level. Semantic dependency alone significantly influenced preposition placement in the TOEFL11 (p = .023, φ = 0.60). These results suggest a need to incorporate instruction on register differences (formal versus informal situations) and verb subcategorization into the Korean EFL curriculum.

Keywords:

preposition stranding, pied-piping, Korean EFL learners, wh-relative clauses, TOEFL11

Acknowledgments

This paper builds upon my master’s thesis (Ko 2024) with substantial revisions and enhancements. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Seung-Ah Lee for her invaluable guidance, support, and helpful comments on earlier drafts. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions that have led to improvements in this paper.

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