This study aims to investigate the syntactic and semantic differences of the usage of the English coordinator ‘and’ between Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and a Korean Learner Corpus of English which consists of argumentative writings written by a total of 117 students at the mid and high beginning level who took an English writing course at a university in Spring 2017. 286 sentences containing the coordinator ‘and’ from the Korean Learner Corpus of English were compared with 200 sentences with ‘and’ randomly selected from COCA. To see if the Korean learners use the coordinator in a proper way, this study analyzed the data both in terms of the types of coordinated constituents, viz. NP, PP, AP, AdP, VP and S, and the eighty types of semantic relations between the coordinated VP’s and S’s presented by Quirk et al. (1985).
This study argues that the Korean learners are not fully aware of the syntactic and semantic uses of the English coordinator. The Korean learners show the following syntactic characteristics: (1) in NP, improper use of articles, repetitive use of omissible words, inappropriate word order, overuse of ‘and so on’, and conjoining heterogeneous constituents; (2) in AP, misunderstanding of parts-of-speech of words, and non-use of various coordinators other than ‘and’; (3) in VP, repetitive use of omissible words, misunderstanding of agreement between subject and its second verb, and use of a few limited adverbs only; and (4) in S, abrupt change of subjects, and repetitive use of omissible subjects. The Korean learners also show the following semantic characteristics: (1) wrong choice of words with no consideration of their collocates: (2) lack of understanding of use of numbers, comma and parentheses to discern ambiguity; (3) excessive use of ellipses; (4) use of obscure expressions that cannot identify their referents; and (5) putting in an inappropriate word order, which might be caused by misunderstanding of semantic and collocational knowledge of words.