한국인 학습자 코퍼스와 원어민 코퍼스에 나타나는 if-조건문의 사용양상 비교

A Comparative Analysis of the Use of If-conditionals in Korean Learner Corpus and Native Speaker Corpus

The study compares the use of if-conditionals by Korean EFL learners with that of English native speakers through examining two groups’ corpora. Specific focuses for examination were on the differences with respect to the verb sequences in the conditional clauses and the result clauses. For this purpose, 500 if-conditionals were extracted from International Corpus of English(ICE)-USA and TOEFL11-Korean corpus respectively. Then verb features of each clause were annotated and the frequency of each verb sequence type was counted. The results showed the following observations: First, while the native speakers employed various verb types in both of conditional clauses and result clauses, the usage of the Korean learners was mostly confined to standardized constructions of if-conditionals presented in EFL classes and coursebooks, revealing a lesser degree of constructional variety and more skewed distribution. Second, when using (semi-)modals in if-conditionals, the Korean learners revealed overuse of the two modals, namely can and will. In addition, the Korean learners tended to use a certain modal for certain modality, such as can f or dynamic modality and will for epistemic modality, whereas the native speakers’ usage of modals was varied more in terms of modality.