The purpose of this study is to investigate the errors concerning V-ing forms in Korean college freshmen’s English essays in order to provide some guidelines for teaching the forms effectively. The data for this study were retrieved from a learner corpus consisting of 815 essays written by Korean college freshmen. A total of 3,843 words were found in the form of V-ing, which were categorized according to their roles as follows: (a) present participles (1,235 tokens), (b) gerunds (2,591 tokens), and (c) unclear cases (17 tokens). Of the 3,843 forms of V-ing, a total of 292 tokens were classified as erroneous, 137 of which were participle-related errors and 138 gerundrelated errors. The most frequently occurring errors under the categories of present participles and gerunds were the use of a present particle without a main verb (64.2%) (e.g. I *looking for the meaning of the building’s name) and to-infinitive related errors (66.7%) (e.g. Therefore, we try to *changing our college’s image), respectively. Pedagogical suggestions based on the findings of the study are also provided at the end.

This study explores the distribution of the multi-functional V-ing construction in Korean college freshmen’s written English, focusing on its use across different proficiency levels and text types. A small corpus (75,000 words) consisting of narrative and argumentative essays was analyzed, producing the following results: 1) The overall frequency of the V-ing construction exhibited a relation, though non-linear, with L2 proficiency. 2) The V-ing construction was more common as the gerund than the participle, a pattern consistent with what was observed in previous NS studies. 3) In argumentative essays, gerunds as sentential subjects were as common as the prepositional object function in contrast to the overwhelming number of prepositional objects in NS data. 4) The adverbial participle clause emerged ahead of the nominal modifier, and the subordinate participle clauses tended to precede the matrix clauses in the narrative essays and in the argumentative essays of the lower level learners. Influence of the essay prompts, learners’ insufficient knowledge of the lexico-discourse features of the gerund and the participle clauses were conjectured to have attributed to the pattern incongruent with that of NS usage. Pedagogical implications are suggested to enhance L2 learners’ knowledge of the target construction.

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.

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.