kind of, sort of의 담화표지어 용법

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the discourse markers of kind of and sort of . Kind of and sort of is mainly known as adverbs. it is found, however, that kind of and sort of also functions as a discourse marker. This thesis goal is to examine the use of kind of and sort of as a discourse marker on corpus based. First of all, in comparison with British English, American English shows its preference of kind of to sort of. On the other hand, it was found that sort of was more common in British English than in American English. This study examines kind of and sort of collocations with NP, VP,AdjP, AdvP. As the results of this study, both of kind of and sort of placed similar collocations and kind of is more commonly used before noun-phrases, while sort of is more commonly found before verb-phrases. The analysis of COCA produced that both kind of and sort of showed high frequency in the corpus and they have various semantic meaning such as a face-threat mitigator, a delay device, a compromiser, and a softener depending on which constituent the marker modifies. This result could help EFL students to understand kind of and sort of as effective as possible.