<Articles> The interpretation of the Korean pronoun ku ‘he’ with regard to quantifiers

[Abstract] The Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) (Montalbetti, 1984) refers to the phenomenon where the overt pronouns cannot take a quantifier as antecedent in languages which allow both null and overt pronouns. Since the OPC involves a subtle interpretive property of an overt pronoun, acquiring this knowledge for second language (L2) learners whose L1 grammar does not allow it creates learnability problems (Kanno, 1998b; H-J Song, 2013). From a generative perspective, I hypothesize that if L2 learners show knowledge of the OPC, this lends support to the UG-driven account. The present study sets out to investigate the OPC phenomenon in Korean with native and L2 speakers of Korean by utilizing a truth-value judgment task. The results showed that the L2 speakers favored the interpretation consistent with the OPC in a similar way to the native group despite learnability problems and suggested that the UG driven account for their acquisition can be maintained.