The purpose of this study is to examine how hedging expressions in terms of lexicon and syntactic structure were presented in English listening test of Korean CSAT as a pragmatic strategy for Korean learners. To achieve this purpose, two questions were raised: Based on English listening test of Korean CSAT, 1) how do hedging expressions appear in terms of lexical structure? and 2) how do hedging expressions appear in terms of syntactic structure? In order to answer the research questions, the items of listening test from 1994 to 2022 were divided into two groups, the monologue and dialogue to figure out differences of their phonetic properties according to Nunan(1991)’s classification. Also, Crompton(1997) and Kim(2008)’s taxonomy of hedges were used because they defined hedging expressions as a pragmatic strategy. This study was analyzed by the corpus program, Antconc. The results indicated that hedging expressions used in the listening test in Korean CSAT appear depending on given taxonomy of hedges differently. First, the lexical hedging expressions were used more frequently than syntactic ones. In addition, these hedging expressions used in the listening test in Korean CAST appear depending on the type of linguistic data differently. Second, the rate of all syntactical hedging expressions in the monologues was approximately six times higher than in the dialogues. Some syntactical hedging expressions also have different meanings depending on the type of linguistic data, even if they are the same forms. More detailed accounts for analyzing are discussed in the paper.

This study is to construct and compare a high frequency word list of different topis in L1 and L2 children’s English newspapers. The Kids Times and My Apple News are selected for L2 children’s English newspapers, and CBBC is chosen for L1 children’s English newspaper. The chosen children’s English newspapers are constructed into text corpus for the analysis of topic-based frequency list extraction. The topics covers five areas: Special Focus, People, Nature & Animals, Sports, International News. The findings are the frequent words concur in both L1 and L2 English newspapers. They are highly co-related to the national curriculum vocabulary list. Discrepancies between L1 and L2 word list can be utilized for inter-cultural awareness learning opportunities.

This study aims to study some similarities and differences in content, vocabulary and linguistic features of maritime safety news and maritime security news in self-built corpora through the two strategies of keyword extraction: comparison against a representative general English corpus and cross-validation. It is found that the content of the maritime safety news is concerned with the safety of operation process, safe regulation, and the recent topic: Covid-19, which is to report the safety of the ship and related personnel. On the other hand, the content of the maritime security news is focused on pirate attacks, robberies, and other external factors of security. Cross-validation shows that maritime safety news prefers to use modal verbs, while maritime security news prefers to use the passive voice. We also explore which syntactic pattern is preferred through adjacent collocates of ‘safety’ and ‘security’ in both of the news. In addition, we investigate their window span (-5 to +5) collocation through examination of several statistical measures to find out similarities and differences between a pair of near-synonyms ‘safety’ and ‘security’ used in the two corpora.

Metadiscourse refers to those aspects of texts which can lead to the construction of writer and reader interaction. Taken this into account, this study set to investigate how men and women used metadiscourse features in social media in the English language context. Being corpus-based in nature, this study privileged a corpus of 145,213 words gathered from such social media as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter divided by gender of male and female who wrote in English as the language of communication. For analyzing metadiscourse features, Hyland’s classification (2005) was applied that divides metadiscourse features into two main categories of interactive and interactional. The results indicated that in overall both male and female corpora contained more interactional metadiscourse features than interactive. In addition, female corpus contained more metadiscourse features than male corpus. Added to this, it was found that self-mentions were the most frequent instances of metadiscourse features in both male and female corpora. Moreover, it was revealed that although male corpus had instances of code glosses, the female corpus lacked it. The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference between males and females in using metadiscourse features. The findings of this research can have useful implications in such areas as gender studies, comparative studies, corpus-based studies, and contrastive linguistics.

Academic discourse is the product of agreement negotiation among members in academic communities. The primary rhetorical function of academic discourse is to persuade the readers into agreeing upon the writers’ claims. This rhetorical function can be embodied through textual linking and stance expressing realized by linguistic devices. Metadiscursive nouns, as an extension and supplementation of metadiscourse, combine these two functions and contribute to the cohesion of textual organization and the conveying of writers’ stance. This study explores the difference in the employment of this linguistic device in PhD dissertation written by Chinses advanced English learners as novice writers and research articles published in international journals written by expert writers in the field of foreign linguistics and applied linguistics. The purpose of this study is to reveal the different ways of knowledge construction by means of metadiscursive nouns in the two genres and the interactional conventions embedded in the academic communities. Explicit instruction strategies are provided to enhance the pedagogical practice in academic writing.

This paper attempted to analyze the effectiveness of cross-linguistic influence on the EFL learners’ production of English dative constructions by using a written corpus. Dative constructions – double object (DO, e.g., Tom gave Mary the book) and prepositional dative (PD, e.g., Tom gave the book to Mary) construction – have attracted much attention in the domain of SLA and cross-linguistic influence due to their distinctions across many languages (Whong-Barr & Schwartz, 2002). In particular, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese EFL learners’ corpus were chosen in the present research because the syntactic and semantic perspectives on the dative structures of their L1s are varied. To reach the aims of this study, the frequency of English DO and PD structures in EFL learners’ and English native speakers’ written corpus (ICNALE) was compared. The results indicated that (ⅰ) Chinese group used significantly more DO constructions than Korean and Japanese groups; (ⅱ) Korean and Japanese groups showed no significant difference in using English dative structures, addressing their infrequent use of DO construction in L1s; (ⅲ) only Chinese group showed native-like use of English dative constructions. These findings suggested that cross-linguistic influence affects the acquisition and production of English dative structures of EFL learners and they involved the pedagogical implication.

This article takes a variational pragmatic approach to formulae of apology in Irish English by comparing the speech of the speakers from Northern Ireland and that of the speakers from the Republic of Ireland. Using the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ireland) as a basis, the analysis centers on the different patterns of apology between these two regions not only in the frequency of occurrence and the types of apology, but also in the contextual constraints on the use of apology. Results indicate that there is no significant difference between the two regions whether in the frequency of occurrence or in the types of apology formulae. However, contexts are found to exert significant effect on the use of apology formulae. In public and institutional contexts, particularly those related to legal and political systems, the formulae of apology are much more frequently used in Northern Ireland than in the Republic of Ireland, which supports the hypothesis that political borders influence the choice of language use as proposed in previous studies.

This study explores whether the usage patterns of English resultative constructions in argumentative essays written by Korean EFL learners follow the usage-based perspectives. The present study used two corpus-based analysis to investigate the usage patterns of four types of English resultatives among different proficiency levels as well as the range and frequency of verbs that learners used in the target constructions. Multiple Chi-square analyses showed that the usage of both transitive and intransitive resultative constructions gradually increases as learner's proficiency increases. Also, it is indicated that EFL learners were more likely to produce the resultatives denoting change of property with increasing proficiency. In addition, results showed that as learners’ proficiency was higher, they employed less frequent and more varied types of verbs in the target construction. The overall results obtained from the current study suggest that L2 development of English resultative constructions reflects a usage-based developmental tendency similar to that of L1 children.