A multifactorial analysis of particle placement in Korean EFL learners’ writings

This paper statistically investigated the particle placement in Korean EFL learners’ writings, based on the corpus data. Two corpora were selected for the study. One was the Korean component of the TOEFL11 corpus, and the other was the ICE-GB corpus. After all the sentences with particles were extracted from these two corpora, twelve linguistic factors were manually encoded. Then, the data were statistically analyzed with R. Two statistical analyses were adopted. One was logistic regression, and the other was Behavioral Profiles. Through the analysis, the following facts were observed: (i) five linguistic factors were involved in the choice of particle placement, (ii) two linguistic factors were involved in the differences of two groups of speakers, and (iii) one type of construction (with the ‘verb + object + particle’) showed similar characteristics in both groups but the other type of construction was different in two groups of speakers.