5가지 장르에서 사용된 대조 연결사 ‘however’와 ‘but’의 코퍼스 분석

This study is to provide profound insights into the language use of non-native speakers related to the overuse of ‘however’ as a contrastive connector. It adopted the recent data from COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English) corpus comprising five genres of ACAD(academic prose), MAGA(magazine), NEWS (newspaper), FICT(fiction), and SPOK(spoken). It then examined the connector of ‘however’, along with ‘but’ which can be replaced with ‘however’. Specifically, it examined the frequency, percentage, position and usages. The results show that native speakers are found to use a higher percentage of ‘but’ than ‘however’ in all genres. ‘But’ is used in ACAD with 62.3%, and in all the other genres with over 90%. But ‘however’ is used in ACAD with 37.7% and in both MAGA and NEWS within less than 10% each. As for the position, ‘but’ is placed at BSC(the beginning of a sentence or clause) with a higher ratio, and ‘however’ is placed at BSC and ISC(inside the sentence or clause) with a lower ratio. This study also delineates some remarkable usages. Overall, the specific usages of the two connectors are found to be different depending on genres. This study provides practical suggestions in helping learners solve the overuse of ‘however’.