The present study investigates the semantics involved in the L2 English article use by Korean EFL learners. The examined usage data were extracted from the researcher compiled learner corpus, the Kyungpook National University Student English Learner Corpus-Writing (KSELC-W). The importance of current research is in the fact that the investigated data was not collected through formal elicitation tasks or grammar focused activities. Therefore, the learner corpus data represent Korean EFL learners' unconscious knowledge of the English article system and their performance on timed writing sessions which did not focus on grammar. The findings reveal that Korean EFL learners do not make random misuse or overuse errors in production of English articles the and a(n) and that the patterns are in accordance with the Fluctuation Hypothesis. Additionally, results show that the semantic feature specificity effects the Korean EFL learners in the current study and provide supporting data for direct UG access underlying article choice. These results support previously reported findings by Ionin et. al. (2004, 2009) and Ko et al. (2009).

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.

The present study aims at examining the similarities and differences in the published research article abstracts between native(NS) and non-native English speakers(NNS). Using the comparative analysis of two corpora, the study compares the top 10 most frequently used key words and concordance lines shown in each corpus and analyzes the two groups’ different perceptions, study foci, issues, and lexical choices. The results of the study reveal that NS and NNS have different thematic interests, issues they are dealing with, and perceptions about their English, English teaching, and learning in the abstracts of published articles. Even though the study has relatively a small data set, it provides empirical evidences for the assumption that NS and NNS have different perceptions, interests, and issues dealt with in research article abstracts.

The purpose of this study is to find out how the uses of alternating locative verbs have changed in terms of the order between Figure and Ground. As alternating verbs allow the locative alternation by switching the positions of the two arguments, this study focuses only on the argument order. In order to accomplish the purpose, three corpuses are adopted: COHA, COCA and GloWbE. The findings from the collected data reveal the increased or decreased frequency of their constructions, showing which construction has been more frequently used among English users over time. Talmy (2000a) argues that the Figure has syntactic precedence over the Ground in a basic construction. The changing tendency of their uses in alternating locative verbs supports Figure Precedence Principle proposed by Talmy.

This paper aims to explore the problematic nature of the use of adverbial connectors employed in NNS and NS academic essays by using two different corpora from Korean university students and from English native speakers in the UK. Combining corpus-based and discourse analytic approaches, the study focuses on the frequency and distributions of adverbial connectors, thus investigating in what ways this can affect the rhetorical features in terms of the text cohesion and structure. The results indicate that the Korean sample students shared the problem of other L2 writers with the overuse of overall connectors, but they showed a strong preference for using colloquial and spoken forms of adverbial connectors. On semantic relations, the overuse problem occurred in the listing, in particular, reinforcing types of the adverbial connectors. The noteworthy difference is that the mechanical repetitions of listing and contrasting ideas, and connecting them in a cause-effect sequence was identified more frequently in the Korean student texts than in the native student ones. However, counter-argument is more preferred in the argumentative context of the native student texts with more overt use of contrastive connecting items. Finally, most of the misused connectors were identified to simply repeat the ideas in the same viewpoint, which may have led to a failure in developing logical sequences in argumentative discourse. Another misuse type of connectors may derive from sociopragmatic transfer from L1 to L2. The findings thus may give some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise culture-specific register awareness and understand the different semantic types of adverbial connectors.

The appropriate use of hedged expressions is particularly a problematic feature of non-native writers' English academic writings. This study analyses the features of hedging in NNS and NS academic essays by using two different corpora from Korean masters' students and from English native speakers in the UK. This corpus-based study focuses on the types and frequencies of epistemic devices, examining the salient features of hedging used in the Korean L2 writings. The results from both frequency and contextual analysis indicate that they rely heavily on using modal verbs and other certainty markers of adverbs, and this led to stronger and direct statements. Along with their serious confusion with impersonalized or personalized forms in relation to the usage of lexical verbs, they showed a strong preference for giving personal involvement, which occurred in specific patterns of personalized devices in conversational hedges. These patterns can be partly explained by the cultural transfer from L1 to L2 as well as lack of linguistic knowledge across different genres. The findings thus can contribute to giving some pedagogical implications for teaching alternative strategies to raise both culture and genre-specific awareness in the areas of second language pragmatics.