earticle

영어

The paper aims at investigating the cross-linguistic distribution of modal auxiliaries by analyzing the written corpus of TOEFL writing samples contributed by 121,000 test takers. The writing samples were POS-tagged and only modal auxiliaries were extracted from the collection of tagged words. The results showed that the learner corpus had a higher percentage of modal auxiliaries than L1 corpora. While English speakers are reported to use around 1.45% of modal auxiliaries in their writing, the L2 learners of English in the TOELF11 corpus make use of modal auxiliaries by 0.5 to 1% more. Simple correspondence analysis conducted on the TOEFL11 corpus also revealed that Romance languages were closer with each other than other groups of languages, and East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese were measured to be closer to each other than other languages with regard to the distribution of modal auxiliaries. Turkish posed a problem in that even if Turkish belongs to the Altaic language family along with Japanese and Korean, it did not show close relationship to these East Asian languages, but to Chinese and German. Even though more research were to be done, the simple correspondence analysis adopted in this paper turned out to be a robust tool that could capture the closeness of languages regarding the distribution of modal auxiliaries.