“Is this parent living?”:Living과 Alive의 한정･서술 용법에 관한 코퍼스 기반 연구

초록

This study investigates the attributive and predicative uses, actual usage patterns, and collocational differences between the near-synonymous adjectives living and alive. While some learner dictionaries indicate living as an attributive adjective and alive as a predicative one, ambiguous definitions like “alive now” leave open the possibility of living being used predicatively, as in Is this parent living? In order to ascertain whether living and alive are strictly used as attributive or predicative adjectives, respectively, this study conducted a corpus-based analysis using data from the 2019 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), focusing on SPOKEN and NEWSPAPER genres, and employed AntConc to extract collocational patterns. The results reveal that living predominantly appears as a present participle or a noun, with attributive adjective use far outnumbering rare predicative instances. In contrast, alive is almost exclusively used predicatively, frequently collocating with linking verbs. Notably, across dictionary descriptions, corpus usage, and collocational behavior, there was little to no evidence supporting regular predicative use of living, suggesting that examples like Is this parent living? are extremely rare and contextually marked. These findings underscore the importance of clarifying such subtle usage boundaries in English language education and lexicography and highlight the pedagogical value of contextualized vocabulary instruction over simplistic synonym memorization.

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