Syntactico-semantic realizations of pronouns in the English transitive construction: A corpus-based analysis

Abstract Pronouns serve as early linguistic cues for the acquisition of the English transitive construction (TC), but previous research has been limited to first language (L1) settings. This study focuses on TC input in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context, investigating syntactico-semantic differences in realizations of TC arguments, particularly pronouns, between L1 parental input and Korean EFL input. To this end, four corpora were created by collecting spoken data from L1-English parents talking to their children, L1-Korean EFL teachers, L1-English EFL teachers, and auditory EFL textbooks. From these corpora, transitive clauses were extracted so that their arguments could be categorized. Mixed-effects negative binomial regression analyses and hierarchical cluster analyses (preceded by principal component analyses) showed that in the realization of TC arguments, Korean EFL input differs syntactically and semantically from L1-English parental input, both for the subjects and objects of TCs. The syntactic difference was particularly pronounced for objects, where fewer pronouns were observed in the EFL input than in the L1-English parental input. Semantically, co-occurrence regularities between transitive verbs and arguments were identified only in the L1-English input and not in the EFL input. Pedagogical implications of the findings are also discussed.