Contrastive Analysis of the Hypothetical Conjunction “如果” in Chinese and Korean - A Study of Interlanguage Errors by Korean Learners

Hypothetical conjunctions play a key role in expressing conditional relationships and logical reasoning, making them an important grammatical feature in international Chinese language education. For native Korean learners, due to semantic and syntactic differences between the Chinese hypothetical conjunction “如果” and the Korean equivalent “-(으)면,” errors frequently occur, and the difficulty of acquisition is relatively high. This study examined 615 instances of the “如果…就/那么…” structure produced by Korean native speakers in the Global Chinese Interlanguage Corpus, identifying 111 errors, which corresponds to an error rate of 18%. Based on this data, a comparative analysis of “如果” and “-(으)면” was conducted from semantic and syntactic perspectives. Semantically, differences were found in the types of conditions, the strength of logical inference, and the speaker’s attitude. Syntactically, differences emerged in sentence structure, word order, and combination constraints. As a result, learners tend to make cognitive errors caused by transfer based on the “formal equivalence” of the two expressions, which manifests as “cognitive modularization errors. This study combines grammatical analysis with real corpus data to systematically identify the types and causes of errors, providing deeper insight into the acquisition of hypothetical conjunctions by Korean learners of Chinese.