A Corpus-based Analysis of the Ordering of Main and Adverbial Clauses in Korean Learners of English

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

  This paper reports the result of a corpus analysis of the ordering distribution of English main and adverbial clauses used by Korean learners of English. In English, adverbial clauses can both precede and follow the main clause, but in Korean, they must precede the main clause. To investigate whether L1 (Korean) distributional pattern of main and adverbial clauses influences the use of L2 (English) adverbial clauses, three semantically different adverbial clauses (e.g., conditional, temporal, and causal clauses) were analyzed using two native corpora(Brown and LOCNESS) and a learner corpus (NICKLE). In all three corpora, conditional adverbials precede the main clause more often than temporal adverbials, which in turn precede the main clause more often than causal adverbials. Specifically, Korean learners placed adverbial clauses before the main clause significantly more often than English native speakers. This observation suggests that L1 transfer is persistent in the acquisition of ordering distribution of L2 main and adverbial clauses.