KJC Korea
Journal Central

This research investigates language lstrategies focusing on the four domains of communicative competence. A survey was conducted among 421 participants in three different countries over three years using Language Strategy Use Inventory. The quantitative data from the survey was analyzed using univariate ANOVAs and Pearson correlation in SPSS 24. The findings are as follows: 1) The greatest frequency of strategies appeared in the category of discourse competence followed by strategic competence, grammatical competence, and then sociolinguistic competence. 2) The analysis of strategies according to the variables of learners revealed that grammatical competence is influenced by Korean study place; sociolinguistic competence is influenced by gender, overseas study experience, Korean study place, graduation/schooling country, KFL/KSL, and heritage status; strategic competence is influenced by gender; and discourse competence is not influenced by any factors.

This paper aims to show iconic gestures of Korean speakers by analyzing hand gestures of TV discussion program participants. Iconic gestures can be divided into three cases: when referring to an object through the form or shape of the object, when referring to an object through the object-related act, and when the speakers act according to the event they are talking about. To effectively refer to the object the speakers are describing, they show the aspect of the object by using hands or fingers or makes gestures to demonstrate how to deal with the object. Moreover, the speaker imitates the movement of the figures appearing in the story or makes gestures changing the perspective to explain the scenes of the story. Most of the time, they make such gestures without being aware of what they are doing. These iconic gestures facilitate the efficient understanding of the audience or listeners by referring to the object and effectively expressing the situation of the event.

In this paper, I have accounted for some issues which are concerned with the Korean interjections. The findings are as follows. First, Korean interjection is a part of speech which is similar to sentences. Second, there are two criteria[e.g. functional criterion and structural criterion(the internal structure of interjections)] which can classify the Korean interjections on the perspective of word-formation. Third, based on the functional criterion, Korean interjections are classified into hesitative interjection, emotive interjection, reply interjection, call-up interjection, command interjection, and onomatopoeic interjection, etc. Fourth, based on the structural criterion(the internal structure of interjections), Korean interjections are classified into simple interjection(e.g. root interjection, base-modificated interjection, partial reduplicated interjection, etc.) and complex interjection(e.g. compound interjection, derivative interjection, full reduplicated interjection, ending-combined interjection, josa-combined interjection, etc.). Fifth, base modification is mostly involved in the formation of emotive interjection and onomatopoeic interjection. Sixth, nonmorphological word-creating rule and lexicalization are mostly involved in the formation of reply interjection, call-up interjection, command interjection.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the syntactic distribution and constraints of argument-verb covariance in person, number and gender features of Korean Sign Language (KSL) and to discuss KSL’s distinctive grammatical characteristics in the area of agreement. The result of the acceptability study on the syntactic distribution and constraints leads us to regard that person features expressed through locus as well as number/gender features expressed through hand shapes equally participate in a same syntactic operation. In particular, KSL offers several notable characteristics in agreement phenomena. First, in KSL person, number and gender features all participate in agreement, as number and gender features display the same argument-verb covariance as person features do. Second, in KSL a viable approach to the syntactic operation of agreement is suggested to be feature checking rather than feature sharing or copying as unmarked-marked/marked-unmakred argument-verb relationship is allowed. Third, KSL shows a utilization of an existing grammatical feature for a pragmatic feature, as in the case of multiple spoken languages (Wiltscho 2019). The locus morpheme bearing the first person feature (‘s’) is proposed to have its person feature ‘recycled’ to a logophoric feature. It is hoped that these characteristics found in KSL be of value for the future sign language agreement research.

The text focused on the ambiguity of the syntax of dependent nouns ‘deung’, and analyzed the pattern in which the syntax functions as a hedge. The syntax was classified according to degree of ambiguity, and its semantic function. The syntax was analyzed in detail in relation to the context of 'information presentation' and 'inference and guesswork'. As a result, we could see that the syntax relieves the writer's responsibility for the content of the statement and allows him to form a cooperative relationship with the reader. Starting with a review of the meaning of the dependent noun ‘Deung’, we discussed the ambiguity of the syntax of dependent nouns ‘deung’, and systematically discussed meaning function combined with genre of academic text. This study is intended to reveal what specific language expressions mean in a particular genre of text. These attempts are different from existing hedge studies that focused on an approach from 'entire' to 'items'. Another achievement of this study is the discovery of strategic language resources by paying attention to dependent nouns ‘deung’, which have not received much attention before.

This paper investigates the frequency and distribution of the word ‘frame’ in Korean as a semantic neologism which has been in use for the last 30 years and further examines the collocations and semantic prosody of the word. The data used for this study consists of online news articles spanning from 1990 to 2018 and compiled into two corpora (Naver News Corpus and Chosun·Dong-A News Corpus), which have been time-sliced in order to perform a time series analysis. Chapter 2 presents the methodology of web scraping corpus and discusses the issues related to semantic neology in terms of extraction and identification. Chapter 3 carries out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of ‘frame’ from the perspective of corpus linguistics. The results show that the word ‘frame’ in Korean first appeared in the Naver News Corpus in 2001 and its frequency dramatically increased in 2007, 2012 and 2017, which correspond to the Korean presidential election campaigns. In addition, the analysis of the collocates of ‘frame' within a ±3 window shows that the term mostly has a negative prosody.