earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to investigate which factors influence the choice of English demonstratives and to examine Koreans’ use of English demonstratives. Two experiments were conducted in the research – one was to examine which factors decide the degree of focus, the concept used in the theory suggested by Strauss (1992) as one of the criteria of demonstrative choices, and the other was to explore whether Korean students know that the focus of entities as well as distance affects the use of English demonstratives. For both experiments, task-type questionnaires were used and the results were analyzed using chi-square statistics. In Experiment 1, native English speakers and Korean adults who are advanced learners of English participated. The study indicated that both of the groups were influenced most by ownership among the three factors, ownership, meaningfulness, and price. Experiment 2 was carried out subsequently to investigate if the concept of ownership in fact influence Korean high school students’ use of English demonstratives. The results indicated that ownership, the factor which was used as a substitute of focus in this experiment, did not affect high school students’ choices much. These results suggest that they might not be yet aware of the fact that not only distance but also other aspects such as ownership can have an impact on the choice of English demonstratives.