Korean EFL Learners' Use of to-infinitival and Gerundial Verb Complementation : A Constructionist Approach

Abstract

to-infinitival and gerundial verb complementation patterns in English are known to pose particular difficulties to English as a foreign language(EFL) learners as there are often no equivalents in their mother tongue(L1) and seem no explicit rules governing the choice between the two patterns. The present study set out to examine main verbs co-occurring with either complementation pattern in a corpus of argumentative essays written by Korean university students. Specifically, the study identified distinctive collexemes(DC) or verbs distinctively attracted to one complementation pattern over the other and compared the extracted DCs with those from a comparable native speaker(NS) corpus. Results showed that while the Korean EFL learners were overall able to select verbs semantically compatible to either complementation construction, the direction and strength of verb-construction association in learner data deviated from the NS data indicating the Korean EFL learners’ lack of idiomaticity in collostructional selection. This paper concludes by discussing pedagogical and research implications.