원어민과 비원어민의 논문 초록에 나타난 축약관계사절

Relative Clause Reduction in Research Article Abstracts: Native vs. Non-native Writers Compared

  Building upon Master (2001), who observed that technical research articles by native English speakers utilized reduced relative clauses (RRCs) to create clear and concise texts, this paper examines and compares the occurrence of RRCs in native and non-native academic writing. For this purpose, a corpus of 200,000 words was compiled, which was composed of abstracts of master"s theses published in the States and Korea in the field of humanities, and science and engineering. The data were analyzed focused on the following points: 1) differences between native and non-native writers in the use of RRCs. 2) differences across fields of study in the use of RRCs. 3) syntactic contexts for RRCs. The analysis reveals the following: 1) overall, more RCs were used in the native texts. 2) RRCs were most frequent in the technical writings by native speakers, while least frequent in the technical theses by non-native speakers. 3) RRCs in the native writing were affected by syntactic contexts and information structure, but this effect was not clearly seen in the non-native writing.