The Interplay of Grammar and Discourse: Evidence from Monologic Settings in Korean

This study investigates how Korean speakers manage discourse involving implicit causality (IC) contexts in monologic settings, extending Yi and Koenig’s (2021) exploration of grammar-discourse interactions. Yi and Koenig observed that, following an IC prompt, Korean speakers produce explanation relations less frequently than English speakers. They hypothesized that this difference is not due to a lack of interest in causes but to grammatical constraints in Korean that disfavor explanation relations (cause-and-effect discourse) while encouraging result relations (cause-and-effect discourse). Their hypothesis was primarily supported by conversational data, which showed no crosslinguistic difference in expecting a cause in conversational settings. The present study extends this inquiry by focusing exclusively on monologic settings. In Experiment 1, participants exhibited a strong preference for producing causes as the first sentence when IC contexts appeared as the second sentence, aligning with result relations. In Experiment 2, participants were free to position the IC prompt as either the first or second sentence and then complete a discourse. The results revealed a notable tendency to place the IC context in the second position and provide a cause in the first, leading to an increased frequency of result relations. These results suggest that while Korean speakers universally tend to provide causes given an IC context, they exhibit a clear preference for a cause-then-effect structure consistent with their grammatical constraints. This study confirms the significant influence of grammatical constraints on discourse production in Korean, providing direct evidence from monologic settings that supports Yi and Koenig’s (2021) hypothesis and highlights the complex relationship between universal cognitive processes and languagespecific discourse structures.