대한언어학회 전자저널

Shin, Keun Young. (2025). Acquisition of L2 English determiners and quantifiers by Korean learners: Evidence from a learner corpus. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 33(3), 129-151. Previous studies have primarily focused on the acquisition of articles by L2 learners whose native languages lack an article system. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to how such L2 learners use other determiners and quantifiers. The present study aims to fill this gap and provide a better understanding of L2 syntactic acquisition of functional categories. A total of 35,215 nominal phrases produced by Korean EFL learners were analyzed. The analysis shows that only a few low- and intermediate-level speakers make addition and misordering errors because they have not yet acquired the idiosyncratic properties of one, another, and all, which behave differently from many other quantifiers. Most syntactic errors involve article omission, which is influenced by the presence of a modifier, the use of anaphoric reference, or the specificity of the referent. Article omission is mainly due to a lack of semantic and pragmatic knowledge on articles that do not exist in L1, rather than to the syntactic misanalysis of articles as nominal modifiers, as argued by Trenkic (2008, 2009). Overall, the corpus analysis demonstrates that L2 learners have little difficulty in acquiring the syntactic structure of English DP, in which a determiner occupies the leftmost position and precedes a quantifier.

# determiner # quantifier # article omission # second language # corpus analysis

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