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.

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.