KJC Korea
Journal Central

This study aims to examine how university administrative workers perceive the workplace context under English as an official language policy, and further how their perceptions of the context would correlate with the roles of English uses for work. The data came from the questionnaire responses of 116 employees of a Korean university and qualitative interviews with 6 administrative workers. Descriptive and correlation analyses showed that the participants' evaluation of three contextual factors, i.e., English as an official language policy, online English learning, and coworkers' English competence, was only moderate. In the self-evaluation of their English proficiency, the majority of the participants indicated that they were only able to participate in a short English dialogs, but had difficulty with English discussions. A striking difference was found in the evaluation of significance of English skills between their current work performance and under full execution of the policy. Although most of the participants ranked reading skill the most significant in their current work performances, they selected speaking as the most crucial skill under the full execution of the policy. Implications of the findings are presented for more efficient practices of English as an official language policy at work.

The United States federal government entered a shutdown due to the ideological dispute between Democrats and Republicans from October 1 through 16, 2013. This paper attempts to elucidate ideological representations through a thorough analysis of editorials in two elite newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In particular, we examined how an in-group and an out-group were formed, and how the formation was reinforced in terms of in-group homogeneity and out-group exclusion, by means of linguistic features such as naming choices, the so-called editorial we, and lexical selections, following van Dijk's (1998) ideological square. The results are as follows: (i) the Wall Street Journal emphasized “their” bad properties more aggressively than the New York Times, while the New York Times emphasized both “their” bad qualities and “our” good qualities in a more moderate way than the Wall Street Journal; (ii) the two strategies of emphasis and mitigation enabled both newspapers to reinforce in-group homogeneity and out-group exclusion: The Wall Street Journal openly framed Republicans as the in-group and Democrats as the out-group, whereas the New York Times posited Americans and Democrats as the in-group, in relation to Republicans.

This paper addresses the question of agency in shaping linguistic landscape and its manifold social and political implications in changing language ideology, attitudes and situations in post-Ujamaa Tanzania. Based on empirical data collected in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, this paper attempts to explain shifting agency in shaping linguistic landscape in the context of globalization as well as the spread of English in Tanzania. Agency in shaping linguistic landscape is inseparably interconnected with various social actors'motivations and reflects social changes at large. The domain of human agency behind linguistic landscape (public uses of written language) can be characterized as an epiphenomenon which involves a historical dimension and perspective. The study of linguistic landscape with special reference to agency offers a useful tool for examining various social actors who vie for public space. Agency in linguistic landscape needs to be seen in the wider context of social processes and existing power structures.

This study examines the use of metaphor in TED talks with respect to its density, distribution, and functions. Adopting a cognitively-informed discourse framework of metaphor studies, the present paper quantifies and explicates the extent to which metaphors are mapped across the different disciplines of Art/Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Technology. Also analyzed is the distribution of metaphor across word classes as well as the discursive functions that they work to achieve. The findings indicate that TED Talks are dense with metaphoric lexical units regardless of the type of scholarly discipline. When considering the distribution across word classes, however, diverging patterns in the metaphoric use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and determiners create a dividing line among certain disciplines as in Humanities/Art and Technology. The functions of these metaphors are also described in terms of representational, interpersonal, and textual use. Potential implications for EFL teaching as derived from the analysis are discussed at the end.

This paper analyzes the maximizers absolutely and utterly in discourse, focusing especially on their collocation patterns and stand-alone use. I have elucidated the connection between their combinations in their dependent use and stand-alone use. This study connects the manners of stand-alone use of absolutely and utterly to their collocation patterns in dependent use. Absolutely strongly tends to collocate with positive lexical items, and frequently with an affirmative token, thus absolutely appears in stand-alone use, often as a response token, whereas utterly never occurs in independent use. The stand-alone form tends to be a better fit for interactive pragmatic roles, such as turn initiation, which is used to respond to a prior speaker, absolute acknowledgment, agreement, pre-closing signal, solidarity, and the floor-holding and bridging devices. The larger relevance of this study is to understand the impact of language use, and analyze these words' collocations and stand-alone use.

This paper attempts to demonstrate how speakers' identities are shaped, negotiated, and performed through linguistic practices in a South Korean political podcast called, Naneun Ggomsuda. Focusing on the linkage between linguistic practices and identity performances, I employ two meaningful metaphors embedded in Naneun Ggomsuda, ‘resistant’ and ‘theatrical,’ and explore intersections among these metaphors and linguistic practices, discursive features, and speakers' identities. Within the resistant and theatrical fields of discourse, speakers actively apply speaking strategies to achieve their goals, which include their identity making process strongly interconnected to their resistant and theatrical linguistic practices. Two kinds of identities, resistant identity and theatrical identity, are the focus, and these identities are not only shaped and performed through speakers' linguistic interactions, but also collided and negotiated by both speakers and audiences in and out of the talk show. While many previous studies have focused on Naneun Ggomsuda as an ‘alternative media,’ this paper reveals that Naneun Ggomsuda can actually be a fruitful venue for the academic investigation of linguistic practices and identity making processes.

This study sets out to investigate whether communicative language shift to English is associated with symbolic language shift from Korean mother tongue. In order to investigate the issue, the length of stay and English proficiency level were used as variables of communicative language shift to English, and the symbolic language shift from Korean was measured by attitudes towards Korean and English in this study. Eighty two Korean-Australian secondary school students whose mother tongue was Korean participated in the questionnaire survey. As a result, the length of stay in Australia turned out to be an important factor in explaining the symbolic language shift from Korean: the participants' attitudes towards Korean were more negative and their perception of Korean language was weaker, as the stay length was longer. English proficiency also seemed to work as a factor that affects symbolic language shift from Korean: the higher degree of English proficiency the participants had, the weaker the perception of their mother tongue was. Therefore, this study suggests that communicative language shift to English and symbolic language shift from mother tongue cannot be separated; the two language shifts are closely related each other.