KJC Korea
Journal Central

This paper builds on the special lecture that I gave at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea. The overall paper takes a kind of narrative form with reflective confession. Specifically, it consists of (1) scholarly genealogy of my study, (2) main characteristics of my study, (3) major achievements of my study, and (4) my special relationships with the Sociolinguistics Society of Korea.

This study, first, examines the present international status/prestige of Korean on the basis of the number of speakers, the number of countries where it is spoken, the size of GDP by language, and the comprehensive evaluation considering other factors as well as the number of speakers and the economic factor. This research, next, predicts the ‘rather dismal’ future status of Korean based on the predicted statistics of Korea's future population and potential economic growth rate provided by domestic and international organizations. Finally, implications of the findings of this study are discussed and some suggestions on governmental policies, which could be of help to maintain the current international status of Korean, are given.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how people perceive their surrounding landscape in terms of ethnosemantic perspective. The research area is named as ethnophysiography, which is coined recently. The paper is based on the ethnographic data collected in two different areas: mountain and plain area. Speakers in two areas perceive and categorize their landscape very similarly. The similarity can be explained by the concept ‘cognitive saliency.’ which means that people perceive their environments with respect to the cognitively and perceptually salient features. However, this study is a pilot one, which should be refined with more empirical data collected with the ethnographic method in various areas.

Existing discussions about assessment scales of broadcasting language had different assessment items according to the point of view and there were many restrictions to actually use them because no consideration was made to importance of assessment items. This study aims to develop assessment scales with high validity and effectiveness for broadcasting language. For this, logical structure of evaluation category and assessment items of broadcasting language were drawn on the basis of advanced researches on requirements for broadcasting language. With respect to evaluation category and assessment items of broadcasting language, weight rating was conducted on 14 Korean language experts and 14 broadcasting experts using the analytic hierarchy process. As for the evaluation category based on assessment result, relative importance was calculated in the order of fairness(31.5%), publicness(26.15%), accuracy(24.75%), and soundness(17.60%). As for the evaluation items, ranking was determined in the order of ‘Do you use expressions with low dignity?’, ‘Do you use discriminatory expressions?’, ‘Do you use biased expressions?’, and ‘Was incorrect transcription exposed on the subtitles?’ In addition to this, discussion was made about differences in evaluation outcome of Korean language experts and broadcasting experts.

Humor can be the main subject of sociolinguistic research since it indirectly reflects how people, who actually produce and enjoy humor, think about the main issues of their community. The military employs many forms of humor within its organization to relieve tensions in communication. As humor helps people to resolve the anxieties and rigid thoughts and become more flexible, various contents and forms of humor are produced and circulated within the military. With the subject of military-humor text consisting of contents relating to military society, this research looks into the motivation of humors that were produced and enjoyed as a narrative by current and previous military personnels and also the socio-cultural implication reflected in that humor text. Through this research we were able to verify various traits of the military using linguistical approaches. While military-humor texts do indirectly disclose the negative aspects of society, protects one's self-confidence and resolves repressed desires, it is also produced and enjoyed by a number of people simply for entertainment. These military-humor texts also include socio-cultural implications such as double perceptions towards military service, rank-orientedness, authoritarianism, de-individuation, isolationism, formalism, and thinking rigidity. I hope the results of this research is found useful in analyzing the socio-cultural characteristics of the military.

This study examined how ELF-oriented features were incorporated into English textbooks used in Korean middle schools. A total of 213 dialogues and 214 reading texts presented in 21 textbooks were analyzed from the perspective of English as a global language. The analysis of the data revealed the following findings. First, most of the textbook dialogues took place between either English native speakers or an English native speaker and a Korean speaker, with the number of dialogues involving non-Korean ESL or EFL speakers remaining very low. Second, nearly all the audio-recordings of the dialogues and the reading texts presented American English accent regardless of the nationalities and cultural backgrounds of the speakers or narrators in the materials. Lastly, a considerable portion of the reading texts contained topics or situations that can potentially enhance learners' interculturality, though ELF-related issues were rarely addressed in the texts. Based on the findings, this paper suggested some implications for ELF-based English education in Korean context.

In conversation analysis (CA), closings of a conversation are explicated as achievements by parties working through structural problems of coordinating a simultaneous exit from the conversation. This paper examines closings of calls to an airline service in Korea using the method of CA. As calls to the airline service are built with an orientation to an expectably single business, resolution of the business at hand－typically a flight reservation－occasions the relevance of closing. Closings of airline service calls are structured into pre-closing and terminal sequences. Agents' announcement of a completion of the reservation, thus of the business at hand, constitutes a pre-closing move. Customers align with the pre-closing move normally by producing an acknowledgement in response. Following pre-closing sequences, agents initiate a terminal sequence by producing a terminal component in a standard format required by the institution. Customers typically respond with an acknowledgement ‘yes’ token, collaboratively achieving a termination. In the achievement of closing sequences, parties orient not only to the particular trajectory of activities and pre-closings they have been engaged in, but also to the particular type of conversation as one of customer service.

Internet nickname is a kind of temporary names that netizen want to use them to show the identity and differentiation from other netizen in the internet communication. The purpose of this paper is to compare and analyze the internet nicknames which are created and used distinctively in SNS of Korea and China. The main emphasis of this study is on the structures, the types of meanings, and making motivations of internet nicknames. The data are collected from the Twitter used by Korean netizen, and the Weibo used by Chinese netizen. The structural aspects of internet nicknames are divided into single structure and composite structure. The meaning types of internet nicknames are divided into ‘self-information’, ‘idol information’, ‘pursuit information’ and ‘the others’. The motivations of creating internet nicknames by netizen are divided into ‘linguistic efficiency motivation’, ‘creative expression motivation’, ‘play motivation’, ‘strengthen relation motivation’, and ‘psychological liberation motivation’. As a result of research, we could clarify the sameness and the difference of the linguistic culture on cyberspace between Korea and China by analyzing the internet nicknames.

This study examines the use of first-person plural pronouns in spoken Chinese from a conversational-analytic perspective. Focusing on the pronouns, women and zanmen, this study shows that the use of first person plural pronouns systematically functions to create a membership category between participants. In particular, we investigate the exact categories that are enacted and how the participants in a conversation recognize and use them in the course of an interaction. We argue that participants produce and recognize categories in their talk and that these categories index aspects of a speaker's relationship with the other participants, such as social difference or intimacy. This study offers a new understanding of what motivates speakers' choice of discourse forms and patterns in the evolving sequence of talk.(123 words)

This study aimed to contrast and compare the Korean native speaker’s and the Japanese native speaker’s use patterns of language strategies in the persuasion situation from the perspective of politeness. Through this study, under the situation of ‘recommendation’ where the other being persuaded felt relatively less burden, the Korean native speaker and the Japanese native speaker showed the pattern using the same strategies for persuasion in the order of the ‘objectivity-pursuing strategy’ > the ‘speaker’s position-expression strategy’ > the ‘listener’s mind-inducement strategy’. Next, for the case that the other being persuaded was belonged to the lower status than the speaker in their social relations, it was found that Korean native speaker showed the tendency trying to persuade the other by using the ‘speaker’s position-expression strategy’ regardless the listener’s response types, but Japanese native speaker showed the pattern highly using the ‘speaker’s position-expression strategy’ only in the equal social relations between the speaker and the listener (the other being persuaded) if the other directly refuse the speaker’s suggestion. So far, this study investigated the both Korean native speaker’s and the Japanese native speaker’s use patterns of persuasion strategies through various variables.

This paper attempts to explore how people communicate “using their body,” otherly put, by nonverbal acts. Through a linguistic anthropological analysis on medical encounters in Korean Medicine clinics, this paper aims to examine how participants perform nonverbal acts as communicative modalities and strategies. By extending previous scholarships that emphasized the significance of nonverbal acts, this paper argues that nonverbal acts are not mere bodily actions, but rather are meaningful acts that index communicative goals, social relationships, and participants’ identity practices. With analysis on conversational data collected through anthropological fieldwork, four salient types of nonverbal acts―eye-gaze, nodding, hand gestures, and distance adjustment― and six communicative functions―back-channel, attitude cue, frame shift, turn-taking, footing, and visual cue―are explored. Furthermore, this paper analyzes nonverbal acts as communicative strategy, which participants employ to achieve their communication goals, build a preferred social relationship, and perform positive identity practices.