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Authors: Johanna Clausse
Keywords: Korean, acquisition, classifiers, Heritage Language Speakers
Abstract: Korean language has less than three hundred classifiers, although they are not known or used by all native speakers. If we want to quantify something or someone, then we must use the Korean classifiers. If we do not use them, the sentence is ungrammatical. This study is about classifiers and not about Measure Words (MW). Measure Words can be found in every language, the “pure” classifiers cannot. In the Korean language, the use of Measure Words and the classifiers are not the same. Indeed, Measure Words can be used with adjectives, demonstratives and relatives causes, whereas classifiers cannot be used with them.
It is very interesting to study the classifiers in 5 years old Korean-French bilingual children because in French we do not use any classifiers. It will be an opportunity to see if the Korean Language Speakers (Korean here is a minority language, the language which is spoken at home or in a very small community, it is not the society’s language, Montrul : 2016) will transfer or not from the French structure of the sentence. Will they be able to quantify a noun following the French structure? e.g. number + noun for French and noun + number + classifier for Korean (e.g. 1.1. and 1.2.) or they may not use any classifiers.
1.1. Un chien
One dog
1.2. Gae han mali
dog one CLanimal
One dog
This study claims to see if there are any differences or any resemblances between the acquisition process of the 5 years old Korean-French children who are Heritage Language Speakers, the 5 years old Korean natives and the French students of Korean as a foreign language. Can we say that they have the same acquisition process? We will try to show that these three acquisition processes are not the same. To do that, we have planned two tests : a comprehension test and a production test. The comprehension test is a Picture Selection Task where the child has to listen to one sentence and to say if this sentence matches with picture A or with picture B (e.g., the experimenter says “han mali”, “mali” is the classifier which can be only used with animals and the child has to choose and say the picture with the animal is the answer). For the production test, the child has to describe the picture shown on PowerPoint (e.g., in the picture there are six grand-pas, the expected answer is “halabeoji yeoseot myeong (isseoyeo)” “grand-pa six CLhuman there are” (There are six grand-pas)). Through these two tests we will be able to see the comprehension and the production capabilities and difference between natives, learners of a foreign language and Heritage Language Speakers.