영어 형용사 ‘difficult’와 ‘hard’의 사용에 대한 코퍼스 기반 연구와 시사점

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.