The Grammar of Verb Be in Early Korean EFL Interlanguages

Abstract

This paper explores the grammatical properties of verb be in early Korean EFL inter-languages. Unlike in the L1 acquisition of English, it has been observed (Hahn 2000), excessive forms of verb be are attested frequently in early stages of the syntactic acquisition of English as a foreign language in Korea. The excessive presence of the copular or auxiliary verb has triggered interesting debates on its nature: the topic-subject marker hypothesis (Hahn 2000a,b, 2001; Shin 2000, 2001; Ahn 2003a) vs. the incomplete verbal functional category hypothesis (Yang 2001, 2002, 2006). On the basis of the examinations of the Hanyang University Corpus of Korean Learners' English, first, this paper presents some additional pieces of evidence for the topic-subject marker hypothesis. Further, it presents cases of verb be where it functions as a main verb, but differently than its English counterpart.