A contrastive analysis of adverbs and adverbials in German and Korean – Difficulties of Korean learners in the acquisition of German adverbs and Adverbials

Abstract

Adverbs serve the semantic modification of verbs, adverbs and adverbials and belong to the non-inflecting word classes. In this respect they show an obvious similarity to prepositions and conjunctions. A differentiation of adverbs and adverbials can be made with regard to time, place, modality, causality etc. as well as concerning their obligatory or optional valency. The adverbial forms of the Korean language can be subclassified into a productive and a non-productive group. Whereas the historical ending morphemes -i (이) and -u (우)can be regarded as unproductive, lexicalized forms, the ending morphemes -ke (게)and -ya (야) can be regarded as productively connectable to many verb forms. Also the converbal forms -a (아) and -o (오) as well as the coordinative conjunctional form -ko (고) are productive forms. An empirical study shows that Korean learners of German as a Foreign language are hard put in learning the German adverbial forms and applying them correctly. Especially the acquisition of the German modal adverbs seems to be an almost insurmountable obstacle.