The Acquisition of Overt and Null Pronouns in L2 Korean by English Speakers

This paper investigates adult English-speaking learners’ knowledge of the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) in L2 Korean. An embedded overt pronoun in pro-drop languages cannot take a quantified or wh-word matrix subject as an antecedent. This observable distribution between overt and null pronouns is being captured under the OPC, a principle of UG which is operative in Korean, a pro-drop grammar, but not in English, a non-pro-drop grammar. This study examines the relationship between overt and null pronominal alternations in L2 learners’ grammars in OPC contexts by testing a version of the Full Access account. The participants consist of 41 adult English learners of Korean at two different proficiency levels, whom have completed a co-reference comprehension task. The results of the study show that L2 speakers can achieve target-like syntactic representations of the OPC in both subject and object positions, in support of Full Access.