Case-marking optionality in wh-clauses and fragment answers in the L1 acquisition of Korean

Abstract

Children acquire language-specific rules in learning their first language, and various hypotheses have been proposed to explain how children learn them. This thesis examines how one monolingual Korean-learning child, JONG1, from the Ryu Corpus of Korean data (Ryu et al. 2015), acquires asymmetries in the use of nominative and accusative case markings in different sentence structures: declaratives, wh-questions, and fragment answers. The data shows that JONG’s acquisition of case markers is sensitive to different syntactic structures and that he has different acquisition patterns in each structure. JONG’s early production of adult-like and nearly error-free null accusative markers in object fragment answers suggests that he goes through different developmental stages from descriptions in previous literature with respect to the null accusative marker. I conclude that Westergaard’s (2009, 2014) micro-cue model, within the framework of generative grammar, optimally explains JONG’s acquisition patterns of the null accusative markers in object fragment answers; however, the model cannot explain all of JONG’s case-marking patterns in other sentence structures.