Although there are many previous studies that examined quantitative fuzzy semantics, the contrastive study of hedges between the Chinese and Korean languages are still undetermined. Whether one is able to accurately use the hedge expressions reflects the pragmatic competence of the foreign language student. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the corresponding expression of the Korean hedges expression ‘-(으)ㄹ 것이다’ in official Chinese speech texts, and the application of the results from this research as a pragmatic approach to the teaching scene of Korean as a foreign language education to Chinese students. In this paper, the author selected eleven official speeches by the heads of the Chinese government and their Korean translations as the base of parallel corpus. By using the corpus, statistical methods and the pragmatic approach, we found 104 corpus pairs of Korean hedge expression ‘-(으)ㄹ 것이다’ in these eleven official speeches. The results of this study show that the Korean hedges expression ‘-(으)ㄹ 것이다’ is the translation of various Chinese expressions from the original speeches. Moreover, 51.92% of them are unmarked Chinese expressions. It shows that not only were the suggestive expressions translated into Korean euphemism, but also the translators used the Korean hedges expression ‘-(으)ㄹ 것이다’ consciously in order to make it suitable for Korean readers. It suggests that we need to demonstrate the hedges expression ‘-(으)ㄹ 것이다’ in Korean teaching context, in order to improve Chinese students’ pragmatic competence and increase the Korean learners and readers’ acceptance of such expressions.

The purpose of this study is to reveal the differences between SMS dialogues and telephone conversations in terms of statistical distribution of lexemes and conversational structures. In order to do so, we have built two corpora, MoCoDa-cqp and Verbmobil-cqp. Based on the SMS dialogues of MoCoDa and telephone conversation data of German Verbmobil Corpus under the topic “Appointment Scheduling”, this study looks into the dialogue structures taking media differences into account, in addition to the statistic distribution of vocabulary and their part of speech. A dialogue structure consists of adjacency pairs of dialogue acts. With the different pairs and their frequency, we have attempted to find the prototypical dialogue structure. As a result, the dialogue structures varied depending on the medium of the conversation. It also became clear, that the topic of the conversation has a great influence on the dialogue structure. Through this study we have observed that the conversation participants used distinctive vocabularies depending on the medium. This result is closely related to the intimacy between the participants and/or the fact that the media environment, communicated in either written or spoken language, has influence on the vocabularies used. For the investigation of the distinctive lexemes of each corpus we adopted the Distinctive Collexeme Analysis framework proposed by Gries and Stefanowitsch(2004).

Since corpus is a pile of everyday language usage, using computing tools is essential in collecting, sifting, mining and using the meaningful data from the massive text data. In this paper, we introduce two tools for handling the large scale corpus; IMS Corpus Workbench (CWB) and Sketch Engine. The architecture of the tools is the inverted index model as a type of reference database, providing corpus handlers with speed and extendibility. The limit of CWB lies in the Western language character unicode system (ISO-8859), causing unsatisfactory handling of Korean in the full-fledged scale. We need to consider more suitable architectural design for searching, storing and user-friendly interface in case of large scale corpus in Korean.

This study explores the distribution of the subject-to-subject raising (SSR) construction and its allosentences, focusing on the two raising verbs, seem and appear. A small corpus of 1.3 million words was constructed out of research articles produced by Korean and English speaking scholars in the field of literature, political science, and engineering. The analysis of the corpus revealed the following: 1) The verb seem was preferred in the literature articles and appear in the engineering articles produced by English speaking scholars, showing an interaction of lexical meaning and discipline specific features. 2) Both seem and appear mostly occurred in the SSR construction, consistent with findings in previous studies. 3) English speaking scholars preferred to be-deletion over to be-retention when seem selected adjectival/nominal complements, and this tendency was higher when the complements were accompanied by modifiers. The economy principle is suggested as a possible account for the pattern observed in this study. Future research with a bigger corpus of various types of texts is suggested to complement our findings.

A growing body of research has indicated that a lexical bundle approach is effective in capturing the phraseological variation in texts across registers and writing proficiency levels. However, research to date has rarely employed such an approach to analyze small-scale learner writing produced in classroom-based L2 research. In response to Reppen’s (2016) call for promoting the connection between corpus linguistics and language teaching, this study employed a lexical bundle approach to examine the phraseological variation in learners’ co-constructed texts produced in collaborative writing tasks implemented in two task conditions (L1 versus L2 interaction) in EFL classrooms. The results indicated that a lexical bundle approach was able to identify similarities and nuanced differences in the use of formulaic linguistic patterns in a small collection of learner writing produced in the two task conditions. Specifically, learners in the L2 interaction task condition employed more verb phrase based formulaic expressions in their collaborative texts than those in the L1 interaction condition, which may have rendered their texts less academic-like. In addition, learners relied more on longer strings of words (5-word lexical bundles) to express obligation and call for actions in the L2 interaction condition. Methodological and pedagogical implications were discussed.

Little published research studies examined the relationship between cohesion and writing quality of L2 children’s narrative texts using scientific tools such as Automatic Analysis of Text Cohesion (TAACO) and Coh-Metrix. To fill the research gap, this study investigates the development of cohesive devices and writing quality of 59 ESL grade four students over one semester using TAACO and Coh-Metrix. The corpus for the current study contained 177 narrative texts. Results show that L2 grade four children’s use of cohesive devices and the quality of writing has improved over one semester. Low proficiency group of students tends to use more cohesive devices than high proficiency group. Multi-dimensional assessment of writing quality shows that referential cohesive devices would be positive predictors of complexity by length and subordination. The study has contributed new knowledge in the field of second language writing in terms of research, theory, and pedagogy.

This article explores the usage patterns of an open personal construction in Finnish, namely the so-called zero-person construction in naturally occurring conversational discourse, and provides a bottom-up model of these patterns. The aims of this article are twofold. Firstly, the article attempts to shed more light on the functional groupings of zero-person constructions in conversational discourse. Secondly, it tests the suitability of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in categorizing a linguistic construction on the basis of its semantico-grammatical and contextual features. Based on the MCA, three distinct groups of zero-person constructions are identified and examined in detail, namely the Narrative, Reactive and Evaluative zero-person constructions. At the macro-level, the article shows the advantages of a usage-based approach combining both quantitative and qualitative methods on the study of interaction and personal constructions. At the micro-level, it offers an example of the use of the MCA in examining a syntactic construction based on its semantico-grammatical and discourse features.

This study aims to explore diachronic changes of close kinship terms such as father, mother, uncle, aunt, son and daughter in North Korean English textbooks as to how the metaphorical extensions of these words occur. To this end, this paper uses North Korean English textbook corpora from 1991 to 2015 and AntConc, a corpus analysis tool employed for the investigation of these close kinship terms with their co-occurring lexical context. The findings are: Most frequent metaphor in the 1990s is the head of state as father and its people as sons and daughters. The metaphor of sons and daughters persists in the textbooks of 2000s, but not the head of state as father. Father stops with Kim, IlSung in its metaphor. In 2010s, father, sons and daughters metaphors have disappeared, though other metaphors remain in fatherland, motherland and mother tongue. The engineered metaphors such as father and sons/daughters by the state tend to be easily forgotten due to its forced nature of these expressions. This disappearance of metaphor shows a critical difference of metaphorical endurance between naturally occurring metaphors and artificially formulated metaphors.