Earticle

The English modal system is complex, and linguistic descriptions of the modals present varied accounts of the meanings that modal verbs express. It is therefore unsurprising that English modal auxiliaries can present difficulties for language learners. Focusing on can and could, this article uses the highly graded academic writing in the Michigan corpus of upper-level student papers (MICUSP) to describe epistemic modal use of can and could by L1 writers. This description is then employed in analysing the use of can and could in academic writing by Vietnamese learners of English, and in discussing atypical uses. Our analysis found that atypical uses of could involved the use of could to express meanings in contexts where likelihood was relatively high, making can more appropriate. Based on this analysis, pedagogical applications are suggested for English language teaching.

This article examines the relationship between sentential subjectival position and sentential syntactic complexity using the written section of the ICE-GB as the data source. The information the subject bears is generally regarded as given, with new information provided by other functional classes after it. This means that generally the part of the sentence after the verb would more elaborate, hence longer, than the one before it, manifesting the principle of end weight. Since the English language is basically an SVO language, this seems to suggest that the position of the subject in the sentence would have a certain relationship with sentence length, hence sentence complexity. The result shows the relationship between sentential syntactic complexity and sentential structural variation in number of sentences with different structures is bell-shaped, which can be described with Nemcová and Serdelová’s synonyms and word length model. The sentential subjects appear in 46 different positions in the sentence, but the predominant position is sentence initial. Generally, the sentential subjectival position is an indicator of sentential syntactic complexity; the larger the sentential subjectival position, the more syntactically complex the sentence. This phenomenon, apart from rhetorical and stylistic reasons, is due to the principle of end weight and communication dynamism in the sentence.

While recent corpus linguistic research often focuses on the text–lexis interface, the present study aims to investigate the ways in which grammatical forms can be related to textual functions of lexical items. This question is explored through a functional analysis of the plural noun “days” in comparison with that of its singular counterpart studied in Mahlberg (2005). Results from the qualitative analysis and quantitative comparison of distribution patterns of the two nouns reveal that the functional profile of the plural form is different from that of the singular form in some aspects, as far as textual functions of time nouns are concerned. This is argued to illustrate the inseparability among text, lexis and grammar.

This study examines the reading passages in Vietnamese upper secondary English textbooks across three curriculum revisions (2006, 2012, and 2018). A corpus analysis was conducted to quantitatively analyze lexical, cohesion, syntactic, and readability features with Coh-Metrix. The 2006 edition exhibited a clear progression in complexity, with significant differences in word count, sentence length, lexical diversity and readability across grade levels. The 2012 and 2018 editions, while generally more complex, showed less consistent patterns of increasing difficulty. While these revisions suggest an overall trend towards more challenging texts, the lack of consistent patterns in other features highlights the need for a deeper understanding of how textbook features interact to influence reading difficulty. Future research should explore the qualitative aspects of textbook content to provide insights into how specific lexical choices and syntactic structures impact comprehension.

This paper looks into the translator’s style by examining two translators’ translation patterns found in their Korean translations of three English fictions each. The corpora compiled for the current study are comprised of translator Lee Inkyu’s translation corpus and translator Kim Oksoo’s translation corpus. Through the ‘n-gram’ analysis, the most frequent words (MFWs) in the English texts were identified. Among the identified MFWs, ‘as if’ comparisons were chosen to be examined closely. Then the corresponding words and contexts to the ‘as if’ comparisons were extracted from the translator corpora, and the n-gram analysis for the newly compiled translation corpora followed. Consistent patterns were observed in the two translators’ multiple translation texts. The stylistic features found for each translator in this study can be used in translator attribution analysis: 1) when one or more of the two translators in question is considered to be the probable translator of an anonymously translated text and 2) by comparing the translator(s)’s stylistic traits with the anonymously translated text.

This paper conducts keyword analysis for Chinese-to-Korean translated statutes in comparison with untranslated original Korean statutes to analyze whether Chinese-to-Korean translated statutes are following rhetorical conventions of untranslated original Korean statutes. The conventional approach in legal translation focuses on the fidelity and achievement of equivalence between the source text and the target text. However, there has been a shift in legal translation. As an act of communication within the mechanism of the law, legal translation has its main emphasis on text reception. Against this backdrop, this paper adopts a more reader-oriented approach in legal translation. The translation of statutes, as a part of public-sector translation is aimed at providing information and focuses on the understanding of recipients. Therefore, it can be expected that translated statutes will follow rhetorical conventions of the same genre in the target culture. The investigation of five style keywords revealed that adequacy to the Skopos is not fully attained in the Chinese-to-Korean translated statutes.

사망기사는 각 언어 문화의 특성이 반영된 귀중한 자료임에도 불구하고, 한국 학계의 관심을 받지 못했다. 특히 언어학적 관점에서 사망기사를 조명한 최근의 연구는 찾아보기 어렵다. 이에 본 연구는 코퍼스 분석기법을 적용하여 한국 및 영미권의 사망기사를 비교 연구하였다. 코퍼스 분석 프로그램 워드스미스(WordSmith)의 어휘목록(wordlist), 클러스터(cluster) 분석과 용례색인(concordance)을 활용하여 한국어와 영어 사망기사에 등장하는 고(高)빈도어를 찾고, 이로부터 각 언어 사망기사의 의미 있는 패턴을 포착하여 각각의 특징을 정리하였다. 본 연구에서 수집 분석한 코퍼스에서 한국과 영미권 사망기사는 뚜렷이 구별되는 특징을 보였다.

This study examines newspaper obituaries in Korean media and English media. Initially, 100 Korean obituaries were collected from the JoongAng Ilbo which span over more than three years, from May 2011 to August 2014. After that, another 50 Korean obituaries were gathered from the DongA Ilbo which were published over the same time period with the JoongAng Ilbo. As for English newspapers, obituaries from the New York Times and the Guardian were included in the corpus for comparison. First, the structure and composition of obituaries in each language (Korean and English) are compared. Korean obituaries show a pattern of a combination of a death notice and an obituary. Second, distinct features of each newspaper are discussed. The JoongAng Ilbo has its obituary section titled "Life and Memories", and the DongA Ilbo's obituaries are under the heading of "Rest in Peace." Obituaries in the New York Times appear in print on different pages of the paper according to the deceased's field of interest. Following discussion of formal structure and characteristics of each newspaper, Korean and English obituaries will be compared in terms of content and cultural context.

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of Secondary School English Teacher Recruitment Exams (SETRE) in the years 2002 to 2020. With a corpus-driven approach, the objective of this study is three-fold: (a) to assign CEFR levels to the SETRE, which purport to test the qualification of English teachers in Korea; (b) to probe the text coverage of the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL) of the SETRE; and (c) to generate a list of high-frequency words that have recurrently appeared in previous SETRE. The results derived from an online lexical profiling tool, Text Inspector, and a range program are as follows: First, all of the SETRE, conducted in the last nineteen years, were above the C1 levels, corresponding to proficient users of English. Second, in terms of the text coverage, the GSL and AWL, as a pair, yielded around 90.37% distribution, falling short of the optimal range of 95% to 98% estimates. Third, under two parameters of range and lexical frequency, highly frequent core GSL and AWL word families along with technical words were compiled to highlight the discipline-specific features of the SETRE. In light of the findings, implications are discussed. Since this type of research does not yet exist, this study could lay notable groundwork for further investigation.

언론･여론･외교정책의 상호작용은 끊임없이 진화하며 강화되고 있다. 본 연구는 위 계확산모델을 전제로 미 트럼프 행정부의 마지막 해와 바이든 행정부 첫해인 2020년 부터 2021년까지 뉴욕타임즈가 대북제재에 대해 보도한 기사를 컴퓨터 지원 텍스트 분석 도구인 워드스미스(WordSmith) 툴(Tool)을 활용해 분석했다. 데이터에서 가장 핵심적인 의제를 알아보기 위해 키워드(KeyWord)기능을 사용해 분석해 본 결과 뉴욕 타임즈의 대북제재 관련 뉴스보도에서는 북핵 문제 이외에도 러시아, 중국, 이란이 상 위 키워드로 추출되었다. 또한, 핵심 키워드로 추출된 의제를 중심으로 용례색인 (Concord) 기능을 분석한 결과, 트럼프 행정부 기간 동안 미 언론이 대북제재에 관한 이슈와 함께 러시아에 대한 경제제재에 초점을 맞추어 뉴스를 집중 보도하고 있음을 발견할 수 있었다. 본 연구는 또한, 텍스트 분석 결과를 바탕으로 대북제재가 중국 경 제에 미치는 영향을 살펴보고, 미국의 대외정책 방향에 대해 논의했다. 끝으로 이 연 구는 미디어, 여론 및 외교 정책 간 상호 작용의 복잡하고 역동적인 특성을 살펴보고 국제 관계에 있어 다양한 맥락을 고려한 전략적 접근 방식의 필요성을 강조했다.

The interplay between media, public opinion, and foreign policy is a constantly evolving and mutually reinforcing. This study employs a computer- assisted text analysis tool, WordSmith, to examine the New York Times’ coverage of sanctions against North Korea from 2020-2021, spanning the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden administration. The results reveal that Russia, China, and Iran emerged as significant keywords, in addition to the North Korean nuclear issue. The concordance analysis of the top-ranked keywords further illustrates the US media's focus on economic sanctions against Russia during the final year of Trump's tenure. Furthermore, this article examines the impact of sanctions on North Korea on the Chinese economy and discusses the potential direction of US foreign policy, based on the analysis results. Finally, this study underscores the complex and dynamic nature of the interplay among media, public opinion, and foreign policy, emphasizing the need for multifaceted and nuanced approaches to international relations.

It has been claimed that a polysemous expression will occur in different patterns depend- ing on the specific meaning intended. This suggests that, conversely, the pattern in which an expression is used should reveal which of its meanings are intended by the speaker/writer. In the paper, the meaning-pattern association of the phrasal verb stand by is investigated, based on the observation of the corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The result shows that each meaning of the phrasal verb stand by occurs in a separate set of preconstructed patterns so that it can be easily distinguished from the others. One meaning of stand by, ‘to be present but fail to stop something bad from happening’ is set apart from other meanings, ‘to support’ and ‘to be ready,’ which are more closely linked together. This contrastive meaning has a more restricted set of preconstructed patterns than the other meanings. That is, a meaning that sets itself apart will have a more restricted set of patterns to reflect its specialized usage.

This study aims to find out distinctive lexical features of article abstracts in two applied linguistic journals: PEE (Primary English Education) and TESOL Quarterly. For the purpose, 349 abstracts from PEE and 256 abstracts from TESOL Quarterly published from the year 2004 to 2015 were collected. By using WordSmith Tools Version 6, two corpora were analyzed in terms of frequency, wordlists, keyword lists, key clusters, and research-related words. The findings are as follows: First, native speakers used more words in a single sentence, and their abstracts showed a greater lexical variety than non-native speakers. Second, natives speakers and non-native speakers used function words in similar ways with reference to frequency. However, native speakers used some function words more frequently. Third, the PEE abstracts overused or underused several words due to their specialization in the field of primary English teaching. Fourth, with reference to the use of key clusters in the PEE abstracts, the majority were related to introducing the purpose of the study and reporting the study results. Finally, simple active forms were more frequently used in writing article abstracts and a set of collocations including sentence patterns were also used repetitively by native and non-native scholars in the field of applied linguistics. The results of this study may be used in developing a template for writing abstracts.

This study explores the development of English textbooks in North Korea through corpus-based analysis aimed at illuminating the differences between materials produced during the Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un regimes. In the context of educational reforms and changing political ideology, this study investigates BNC/COCA-based lexical coverage and the key lexical features of North Korean middle school English textbooks, highlighting the complexity, vocabulary, and readability of the learning materials. The findings revealed that the Kim Jong-un regime had implemented reforms to improve English language education, with increased lexical diversity, textual complexity, and vocabulary exposure. Although no significant differences were found between the two regimes regarding the lexical coverage of textbooks, the Kim Jong-un regime’s textbooks exhibited improvements in diversity, readability, and complexity. This study contributes to a broader understanding of the interplay between political ideology and English language education in North Korea, offering insights that have implications beyond the North Korean context and encouraging reflection on the nation-driven educational reform.

The current research made a first attempt to investigate Korean preschooler’s English essays through a corpus-driven approach. The researchers built corpora by collecting a total of 410 English essays from three children attending an English kindergarten. This study derived three important findings. Firstly, the top 15 words that frequently appear in the three selected corpora were all function words, such as modal verbs (will, would, can), articles (a, the), and the dummy ‘it.’ In contrast to previous studies, high frequency words rarely included pronouns and prepositions. Secondly, structurally verb-based chunks and other chunks were the two most common frequent bundles. However, children rarely utilized noun-based and preposition-based chunks primarily because of their level of second language acquisition. Lastly, as children’s English competence increases rapidly, they began to use various chunk structures, moving away from relying solely on verb-based chunks. Although these findings may seem little, this research may pioneer the investigation of kindergarten L2 learners’ writings from a different perspective and yield implications.

As already well-acknowledged in the field, formulaic sequences often make up an important part of lexical knowledge. Within the L2 learning contexts, there is increasing demand for the need to understand and retrieve lexical items as in prefabricated chunks. In tertiary contexts, knowledge of academic collocations is even more required. For individual word forms, there is the General Service List (West,1953), and the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000). However, what the field currently lacks is a list of academic collocations. Identification of collocations was conducted with the British Academic Spoken English and the Academic Corpus for comparison of academic collocations in spoken and written discourse. There was use of 20 node words in each corpus, which produced 934 written and 460 spoken collocations. With more number of written collocations being produced from the corpus, the study provides a comparative view of the top 50 collocations which suggests a concentration of common collocations in the field of economics. Within the guided approach for data-driven learning, there is proposal for the need to facilitate psychological conditions for learning collocations.

The present research is a follow-up research of an exploratory validation study of computer-based dictation tests utilizing TTS (text-to-speech) (Choi & Park, 2015). The study attempted to explore the efficacy of different scoring methods utilizing corpus linguistic techniques. To this end, the data collected from a prior study was employed in the research. 117 Korean EFL learners participated in this research and were divided into three groups depending on educational levels as well as their proficiency levels: 37 UNI (advanced), 40 HSU (intermediate), and 40 HSL (low). Participants' responses were scored using six different methods: GS (graduated scoring), AM (appropriate meaning-based scoring), EW (exact-word scoring), WM (wordlist match scoring), WML (wordlist match scoring including lemmas), and WMS (wordlist match scoring including synonyms). Comparative analysis of the efficacy of the scoring methods revealed that the four methods were highly correlated with each other and that corpus-based wordlist matching was found to be the most effective and robust scoring method. Among the three wordlist match scoring methods producing robust results, WM was proven to be the most effective semi-automated method with high practicality, requiring the least amount of time and energy for scoring.

ESL learners in their earlier stages of interlanguage development have limited linguistic resources, and thus it is only natural that they need to make the most of the restricted knowledge in L2 while engaging in the conversation. This study closely examines the various communication strategies deployed by ESL learners to compensate for insufficient knowledge of L2, to convey what they intend, and to avoid communication breakdowns. In particular, the study addresses issues such as (1) types and frequency of communication strategies, (2) developmental changes in communication strategies, and (3) sources of communication strategies (e.g., L1-based, L2-based). The results of the study reveal that there is a significant difference in the quantity and types of communication strategies between the earlier and later stages of interlanguage development. It is conceivable that some communication strategies may not be accessible to learners at the earlier stages of interlanguage development due to insufficient linguistic resources.

The current study aimed to examine the lexical demand of 70 animation movies and measure the number of word families that could be learned incidentally through watching them, utilizing a corpus-driven analysis. It was found that learners should know about 2,000 word families to have 95% text coverage and about 5,000 word families to have 98% text coverage of the running words of the 70 animation movies. The vocabulary size necessary for understanding the animation movies was lower than that of American and British movies in general. With regards to potential vocabulary learning through watching them, it was found that the learners with the vocabulary size of 2,000 word families might be able to learn 611 word families (11.63%) from the 3rd through the 25th 1,000 word bands and not-in-the-lists when assumed that 95% text coverage was sufficient for understanding the animation movies. Meanwhile, supposing that 98% text coverage was needed to comprehend them, the learners with the vocabulary size of 5,000 word families might be able to learn 213 word families (6.75%) from the 6th through the 25th 1,000 word levels and not-in-the-lists. It was suggested that watching animation movies for an extended period of time on a regular basis could lead to substantial vocabulary learning.

English interjections have been traditionally regarded as being related to speakers’ cognitive indicators, but recent studies have determined that they have various functions as pragmatic markers. The studies, however, have been limited to the uses of native English speakers. Although English is widely taught in Korea, China, and Japan, few studies have been conducted concerning the interjections used by L2 learners from these three countries. This study investigates the features of interjections by English learners from these three Asian countries through corpus- driven methods. The result indicates that which first language L2 learners speak has a great influence on using interjections: Chinese L2 learners use interjections in great numbers, whereas Japanese tend to rarely use them. The reasons why interjections are used have also been investigated: Similar to native English speakers, L2 speakers also use interjections for various purposes, roughly for discoursal and clausal functions. Despite the different pattern of use of interjections among the three groups, a universal phenomenon has been discovered in which prosodic features regarding interjections are likely to affect the use of interjections: the speaking time seems related to determining the function of the interjections.