Present study investigates whether the syntactic constraints of English reflexives and pronouns originally proposed in Standard Binding Theory (SBT; Chomsky 1980, 1981, 1986) are well-reflected in written corpus data in British English by using the ICE-GB corpus. Four linguistic factors including structural relations between the reflexives/pronouns and their antecedents were used to analyze 1,000 sentences (400 reflexives and 600 pronouns) extracted from the ICE-GB corpus. The results demonstrated the following: i) The linguistic factors related to binding conditions showed structural differences between reflexives and pronouns in English; ii) English reflexives showed more cases of discourse binding (i.e., binding outside the sentential boundary) than the original expectation of SBT; iii) With the domain of sentential binding, structural constraints such as c-commanding and binding domain (Governing Category: SSC and TSC) were nearly violated with reflexives.

Hyeree Kim. 2017. Syntactic Variation of Wh-Clefts and the Complexity Principle: A Corpus Study. Studies in Modern Grammar 95, 37-54. This study examines variable usage between to-infinitives and bare-infinitives in wh-cleft sentences in English. There are a number of previous studies dealing with either formal and functional analyses or regional and stylistic variation of wh-clefts. This study, however, attempts to find underlying factors determining the distribution of the two alternatives and investigates whether the so-called ‘complexity principle’ proposed by Rohdenburg (1998, 2000) is valid. Mair and Winkle (2012) used ten ICE corpora as an attempt to verify two out of four hypotheses of Rohdenburg’s principle. Although their findings partially supported Rohdenburg’s claims, the paucity of data turned out to neither prove nor disprove them. This study uses a much larger corpus, the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), and shows that all four hypotheses of the complexity principle are valid: that is, the to-infinitive is more likely to occur, (i) if do is in more complex forms (did, done, doing) rather than in the simple present forms (do, does), (ii) if some elements intervene between do and be, (iii) if be is in the past tense (was) rather than in the simple present tense (is), or (iv) if be occurs in complex forms (e.g. will be, would be) rather than in the simple present or past forms (is, was). Furthermore, this study proposes and justifies a new hypothesis for the complexity principle: that is, the to-infinitive is more likely to occur, (v) if the intervening material between what and do are more complex (or lengthy).

Hyeree Kim. 2016. A Corpus-Based Study in the Diachronic Change of the Adjective/Participle+V-ing Construction. Studies in Modern Grammar 90, 1-30. In the Present-Day English adjectives and participles are often followed by a preposition plus V-ing (hereafter called PG construction). However, some adjectives and participles can be immediately followed by V-ing without an intermediate preposition (hereafter NG). Therefore, such adjectives/participles can have both NG and PG constructions. This article investigates 13 such predicates (happy, comfortable, bored, tired, fed up; busy, engaged, occupied; late, quick, slow, done, finished) in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and examines the frequency changes of their NG vs PG structures in American English from 1820 to 2009. The findings of this study are as follows: (i) NG is a more recent structure than PG, (ii) the frequency of NG has gradually increased over time with most predicates, (iii) except engaged, the percentage of NG to PG was higher in the late 1900 than the early 1800, and with some predicates NG is more preferred than PG in the Present-Day English, (iv) as shown by the fact that some predicates were more resistant to the change, a linguistic innovation does not apply simultaneously but spread gradually across the relevant lexical items/structures.

In the Present-Day English adjectives and participles are often followed by a preposition plus V-ing (hereafter called PG construction). However, some adjectives and participles can be immediately followed by V-ing without an intermediate preposition (hereafter NG). Therefore, such adjectives/participles can have both NG and PG constructions. This article investigates 13 such predicates (happy, comfortable, bored, tired, fed up; busy, engaged, occupied; late, quick, slow, done, finished) in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and examines the frequency changes of their NG vs PG structures in American English from 1820 to 2009. The findings of this study are as follows: (i) NG is a more recent structure than PG, (ii) the frequency of NG has gradually increased over time with most predicates, (iii) except engaged, the percentage of NG to PG was higher in the late 1900 than the early 1800, and with some predicates NG is more preferred than PG in the Present-Day English, (iv) as shown by the fact that some predicates were more resistant to the change, a linguistic innovation does not apply simultaneously but spread gradually across the relevant lexical items/structures.

The goal of this study is to investigate the use of the two English synonymous adjectives difficult and hard through BNC, and to examine Korean college students’knowledge of difficult/hard+noun expressions. The main findings of this paper are as follows. First, The adjective difficult is mainly (83.33%) used to mean ‘not easy to do or deal with’, while hard is mainly (60%) used as idiomatic expressions. Second, both adjectives have different meanings according to the nouns which they are combined with (hard rock/life, difficult decision/concept), and sometimes they have a radically different meaning even when they are combined with the same noun (difficult man, hard man). Third, The average score of the subjects was as low as 54.50%. Fourth, The average score by type is in the order of hard+noun (77.19%), difficult+noun (45.46%) and difficult-hard+noun(38.34%), which shows that the subjects’ overall knowledge of difficult/hard+noun combinations is considerably poor and unbalanced. This result implies that Korean learners of English need to study English, not just memorizing individual words, but with a focus on chunks.

The purpose of this study is to explore the different collocations in English communication verbs, such as say and tell through a corpus-based analysis. Although the verbs say and tell are synonymous, they select different DP objects such as say a prayer or tell a lie. So those differences are explained in terms of collocation. In order to understand the difference of collocational patterns between the verbs say and tell, I attempted to verify them by reading and examining a corpus. The analysis should be useful in understanding collocation since it is based on empirical data. The results show that say is collocated with DPs whose semantic properties have such specific linguistic content as anything, word, hello, hey, hi, etc. that agrees with the semantic field of say. Meanwhile, tell is collocated with the DPs whose semantic properties have the specific linguistic content of facts or information like story, truth, difference, tale, etc. that agrees with the semantic field of tell. This study shows that the semantic properties of nominal objects which are selected by the verb say or tell play an important role in understanding collocationally synonymous as well as different.