2015, Vol.23, No.1

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 1226-4822
https://journal.kci.go.kr/socioling

This paper examines the use of pun in a Korean preschool classroom from the perspective of sociolinguistic study. The purpose of this research is to describe and analyze how Korean young children learn and speak their peer talk and cultural theme in regard to forms and meaning of pun and speech play. For this study, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork for one year at a Korean preschool, focusing on intensive participant observation of teachers’ and children’s interactions, supplemented by in-depth interviews with teachers and children. Through the analysis of social interactions in classroom, I argue that 1) the structural properties of pun(sound patterns, lexicon, syntax, and pragmatics) and 2) sociocultural and interactional meaning(performance, pun in class, taboo as sexuality and curse) in various forms of everyday talk. Keywords: young children, pun,

This study aims to figure out the discourse functions of code switching which appears in the texts posted on SNS, especially Facebook. In order to satisfy this purpose, this study observed and analysed several individual timeline pages whose owners have a plural language background, but live in a monolingual society. The results are as follows. First, a lot of code switching examples appeared in the observed texts, even though the writer lived in a monolingual society. Second, the unmarked code of the individual writers was their mother language and it was chosen when the posting was about the writer's everyday life and appeared as a longer passage. Third, when the writers chose their marked code, they had at least four particular reasons that were related to discourse functions; including or excluding a particular reader, using more effective words, emphasizing or watering down the implications of the text, and changing the speech act or topic. Finally, these results show that the community on SNS is closer to a plural lingual society rather than a closed monolingual community. On SNS, the users act as if they live in a multi lingual space and perform as plural linguals, although, in the reality, they live in a very monolingual society. And this is one of the important characteristics of a SNS discourse community.

This study investigates and analyzes social discrimination factors occurring in Korean coursebooks that disfavor immigrant workers, female marriage immigrants, and North Korean refugees as minorities in Korea. Therefore we examine what kind of social discrimination factors high placed and how these are presented in both verbal and nonverbal expressions. With regard to verbal forms, we examine discriminatory expressions in sentences and conversations including vocabularies commonly used in Korean coursebooks. The result prove that of all other forms of social discrimination found in Korean coursebooks, instances of gender role stereotypes occur most frequently. The second most frequently verbal discriminatory expression found referred to gender personality and behavior, while the third most frequently used discriminatory expression referred to physical appearance and body image. Also revealed in the study was a high recurrence of referencing gender role stereotypes in Korean coursebooks for female marriage immigrants as found through comparing two particular coursebooks. Concerning nonverbal forms, we examine discriminatory expressions in main characters and illustrations. In three types of Korean coursebooks, we observe a high recurrence of gender-biases when discussing job positions. For examples, one coursebook referred to restaurant work as suited for women, whiledescribing the position of doctor as male job. Korean coursebooks for immigrants further reveal discrimination in their descriptions of socioeconomic status as determining so-called higher citizenship status. In illustrations, gender-biases of job and gender role stereotypes were presented more frequently in three kinds of Korean coursebooks than in the other kinds.