earticle

영어

This study investigated the uses of causative devices in a comparable set of corpora comprised of the NS, ESL, and EFL CMC texts. An inventory of 144 devices was prepared and classified by eight syntactic categories; the occurrences of each device were examined and coded accordingly. While the overall frequency of the causative devices did not appear significantly different, substantial differences were noticed in the variety of the devices employed by the three groups. 72, 53, and 29 types out of 144 potential devices covered 100% of the causative expressions in the NS, ESL and EFL corpus respectively, indicating EFL learners' restricted repertoire of causality. The analysis of the function-content word ratio revealed the EFL group’s preference for explicitly marking the relations of the events with function words. A limited set of markers such as because, by + ~ing, because of, and so were predominantly used at the expense of other potential candidates in the EFL corpus. Complex forms of causality and global coherence of discourse were not frequently found in the EFL corpus.