earticle

영어

This paper is aimed at ascertaining the types and frequencies of the grammatical (i.e., number-gender) agreement errors in Korean students’ compositions to show what the most troublesome error is. The data used in this research are extracted from a learner corpus based on compositions written by 137 students who major in Humanity and Arts at a university in Seoul area. All the errors in grammatical agreement are classified into the following three categories: (1) agreement in subjects-verbs, (2) agreement in determiners-nouns, (3) agreement in nouns-anaphoric pronouns. Through a careful examination of these errors, it is found that agreement in subject-verb relationships is the most common error in terms of the frequencies (189 tokens), whereas the percentage of the trials and errors for noun plurality agreement is the highest (37%). Since subject-verb agreement in the Korean language is totally absent, it is easily expected that subject-verb grammatical mismatches are the most frequent. However, the fact that noun plurality agreement, which exists but is optional in the Korean language, has the highest percentage of the errors may imply that intralingual elements of the Korean language may interfere grammatical agreement in English compositions.