A Cross-linguistic Comparison of Verb Bias Frequencies in English and Korean

• Published in: 언어학 no. 96; pp. 33 - 53
• Main Author: Ji Hyon Kim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 사단법인 한국언어학회 01.08.2023
• Subjects: 언어학; Korean; cross-linguistic differences; norming task; written production; verb bias
• ISSN: 1225-7494; 2508-4429
• DOI: 10.17290/jlsk.2023..96.33

The present study addresses the lack of verb bias norming data in languages other than English and aims to contribute to the existing research on verb bias by conducting a norming study in Korean and comparing the results with previously reported English norms. Native Korean speakers participated in a written production norming task with verbs that were Korean translations of the English verbs used in a seminary norming study by Garnsey et al. (1997). The sentence structures used with each Korean verb were analyzed using the relative categorization method. When the Korean verbs were classified categorically as direct-object (DO) bias, sentential complement (SC) bias, and Equi(EQ)bias, cross-linguistic differences in verb bias preference were found compared to the English norming data. All of the English DO-bias verbs in Garnsey et al. (1997) were also classified as DO-bias in Korean, but only four of the English EQ-bias verbs and two of the SC-bias verbs were classified as the same verb type in both languages. However, a second analysis treating verb bias as a continuous variable showed that verb bias estimates in English were the strongest predictor of which sentence structure was chosen for the Korean verbs. The results of this study suggest that previously reported cross-linguistic differences in verb bias may stem from a categorical analysis and underscore the need to treat verb bias as a continuous variable. KCI Citation Count: 0