영어 Tough-구문에 대한 코퍼스 바탕 연구

A Corpus-based Analysis of the English Tough-Construction

  Although a great many studies have dealt with the tough-construction in English, they have mainly focused on the syntactic and semantic aspects of the construction from a theoretical standpoint, thereby ignoring and/or neglecting the problems concerning its uses. This paper is a corpus-based analysis of the English tough-construction and its it-analog construction, and its main goal is to explain what influences the choice between the two related constructions. On the basis of the search results of the four major tough-adjectives, difficult, easy, hard, and impossible, in the four related English corpora including Brown, Frown, LOB, and FLOB corpora, this paper first discusses general aspects of the two constructions in use, and then identifies five main linguistic factors that influence the language user’s choice between a tough-sentence and its it-analog counterpart and explains how those factors work together in making such a choice.