How to Express Causality: A Comparison of Native and Learner Corpora

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study compares the ways in which causality is expressed in a native speaker and a Korean learner corpus by analyzing the use of a total of 63 explicit causative markers. The comparison has revealed several major discrepancies between the two corpora. Compared with the native writers, the learners exhibit a much higher usage of causative devices in general and heavy reliance on a limited range of markers. Causality is mainly realized in the learner corpus by causative adverbs and noun phrases, and to a lesser extent, by conjunctions. The construction of causal meaning in the native speaker corpus is more balanced in terms of the grammatical types of the devices used. The native speakers' strong focus on cause/reason (rather than effect/result) in a causal relationship was found to be much weaker in the learner corpus. A closer examination of the data identified some contrasting collocational, syntactic, and discourse patterning of certain devices as well as a number of misuses by the learners. The learners rarely performed differently in their expression of causal relations even across different proficiency levels. These findings are discussed from diverse perspectives and some pedagogical implications are drawn.

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