How Participial Phrases Are Presented in Korean EFL Grammars and How They Are Actually Used: A Corpus-Based Study

This study examines the presentation of participial phrases in Korean EFL grammar books and compares it to their actual usage in corpus data. We analyzed sixteen English grammar books published by ten major Korean publishers and relevant tokens of the four verbs know, run, find, and write —each representing a different lexical aspect—retrieved from the 2019 newspaper section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results show that although most Korean EFL grammars define participial phrases as reduced structures of finite adverbial clauses expressing time, reason, condition, or concession, the corpus data reveal that participial phrases can also be interpreted as reduced structures of coordination or prepositional phrases and express quite frequently two meanings neglected in Korean EFL grammars: manner and result. Furthermore, almost all grammars fail to discuss punctuation use, and their examples of participial phrases consistently include commas and appear sentence-initially. The corpus data, however, show that sentence-final participial phrases occur about twice as often as sentence-initial ones and that over a quarter of sentence-final participial phrases occur without an accompanying comma. These findings highlight a clear discrepancy between pedagogical descriptions and actual usage of participial phrases, indicating the need for grammar references to broaden the reduced adverbial clause framework and to offer clearer explanations of punctuation and key semantic relations.