A Comparison of the Utterance Patterns of English Negative Polarity Items : Focused on Subjects and Objects

This study investigated the speech acts of Korean adolescents, focusing on the English negative polarity item(NPI) ‘any’, which, unlike Korean, exhibits subject-object asymmetry. Specifically, differences in speech rates of NPIs and indefinite pronouns were confirmed in the subject and object positions. English NPIs mainly appear in negative contexts and conditional sentences, and since they must comply with the C-command conditions, indefinite pronouns mainly appear in the subject position, and relatively both NPIs and indefinite pronouns appear in the object position. Focusing on these basic theories, this study checked what they were like in practice. Overall, the rate of utterance of indefinite pronouns in the subject position was much higher than that of NPIs. And the fact that the rate of utterance of indefinite pronouns increases with age may be a result of learning. In the object position, the rate of utterance of indefinite pronouns was found to be similar and slightly higher than that of NPIs. This means that participants may know through learning or innately that both NPIs and indefinite pronouns are possible in the object position. It was found that the younger Korean adolescents were, the more familiar they were with the use of NPIs with the negative word ‘not’, and the less familiar they were with the use of indefinite pronouns with negative connotation. This is believed to be proportional to the frequency of appearance of ‘not’, which is commonly used in negative sentences in a second language environment.