한국과 미국의 영자신문 사설에서의 연결장치 비교

Abstract

A B S T R A C T

A Corpus-Based Study of Connectors in Editorials of Korean and American English Newspapers

Hyang Sook Kim

This paper analyzes connector usage in the data of newspaper editorials on the basis of the principles from “Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English” (Biber, Johanson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999). The word “connector” pertains to linking adverbials (therefore, however, still, and instead) and conjunctions (and, but and or) which are used as cohesive devices in discourse units. Linking adverbials (LAs) are used to make clear the relationship between two units of discourse and appear in roughly three different places in a clause: at the beginning, in the middle and in the final place. Conjunctions in this study are restricted to the initial place since the researcher selected them only when they connect independent clauses. For comparative analysis, this work compiled corpora consisting of around 77,000 words from editorials of Korean (Korea Times and Korea Herald) and American (New York Times and The Washington Post) English newspapers. Approximately the same amount of data was compiled from each source. The present data feature quite advanced speakers as the non-native group (K-writers) and American native speakers as the native group (A-writers). The main focus is to examine overall patterns of connectors in terms of overuse and underuse, and their positions through both quantitative and qualitative approaches. This study also goes further to describe distinctive persuasion styles of Korean data (K-data). It turns out that K-writers have the opposite dependence for connecting discourse units over the control counterparts; in other words, they used a greater number of linking adverbials (61.7%), while the control counterparts turned to a higher proportion of conjunctions (61.5%), rather than linking adverbials. With respect to the placement of connectors, while A-writers are found to make the best use of initial place with a great number of conjunctions, K-writers placed linking adverbials more frequently in the initial and medial position. In particular, however and on the other hand show higher frequencies in initial position of K-data, whereas yet, still and after all are preferred in the same position in American data (A-data). In K-data, also and however are shown in the medial position in greater frequency. However in K-data is used excessively in the initial and medial position in comparison with but which was used frequently in A-data. The extremely larger frequency of however suggests that K-writers have an inclination to emphasize their points more strongly. Even though the Korean authors of newspaper editorials are advanced speakers with a good command of English, those different features could be ascribed to their status as non-native speakers whose mother tongue has quite dissimilar system. Those different features, in other words, could be interpreted as a sort of distinctive properties in K-data. Regardless of their status of being non-native speakers, however, those differences are fairly compared with those of native speakers. This means that K-writers revealed the opposite preference by relying on more than half of LAs when A-writers selected the same number of conjunctions as cohesive devices. Particularly, the greater number of however in the initial and medial position along with larger frequency of LAs show that their data are composed in an emphatic tone. Therefore, it seems that these well-compared problems should be taken into closer investigations. As a result of this study, it is advised that non-native speakers should perceive the use of connectors is sensitive to register difference and discourse type as Altenberg & Tapper (1998) advised. To raise awareness of the nature of register and to reduce the number of linking adverbials, especially contrastive items, various types of training seems to be needed. Educators can use the hands-on data the corpus linguistics allows them to benefit from, and tapping into ready-made examples with practical activities based on corpus-based approach is recommended. They can also customize specific classroom materials from a data bank of actual language from useful websites or books so that students can be helped in reference to the use of connectors, improving their awareness of the use of them.