sort of와 kind of의 품사분포도와 의미선호도 연구

Abstract

Kim, Sunhee and Lee, Shinwoong. 2017. The distribution of hedging devices sort of and kind of across parts of speech and their semantic preference in American and British English. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 17-3, 655-679. The primary purpose of the current study is to compare the use of hedging devices sort of and kind of in American and British English, centering on their distribution across different parts of speech and their semantic preferences. For the data collection and analysis, two thousand examples of sort of and kind of were randomly extracted respectively from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC). Then, the data collected was analyzed to see if their frequency distribution across parts of speech vary according to the type of hedging device and the type of English. It was found that both kind of and sort of have a strong preference for nouns and verbs both in American and British English in general. However, as for a relative preference, sort of displays a preference for verbs and conjunctions whereas kind of for nouns and adjectives in American English. Meanwhile, in British English, kind of exhibits a strong relative preference for nouns whereas sort of for verbs and the rest of parts of speech. With regards to the semantic preference, it was revealed that sort of is often used with the verbs and adjectives of emotion, whereas no semantic preference was found with kind of.