2023, Vol.31, No.3

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

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

The purpose of this study is to review the discourse on vaccination from a critical perspective by considering coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) news on web portals to be practical arguments advocating for certain actions. For this purpose, this study analyzed the argument patterns of the discourse on vaccination with the keyword COVID-19 vaccine side effects and examined discourse characteristics highlighted by media reports to evaluate their meaning. Contrasting patterns were observed between pro- and anti-vaccine arguments, which consisted of the necessity of vaccination and medical evidence and which focused on personal choice and vaccine side effects, respectively. The characteristics of the political discourse were observed in the contest between these arguments. Rhetorical phrases, which are often used in the political discourse, represented the misleading arguments that lacked evidential accuracy and argumentative validity by maximizing fear, instead of alleviating fear about a health crisis with scientific information and discussion. As fake news trending on social media was introduced to online news portals, which are regarded as public discourse platforms, and undermined trust in the public discourse, it served as an opportunity to politicize the discourse on vaccination.

After Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule, the U.S. established USAMGIK (United States Army Military Government in Korea). USAMGIK required many Korean-English interpreters to serve as language specialists and administrative officers. This study considers Korean military interpreters as a collective concept referring to a group of language experts and aims to analyze news reports about the group from 1945 to 1953. At that time, some news reports criticized Korean interpreters who served for the U.S. military because the experts abused their language power to influence Korean people by using their social position to pursue their own interests. However, such negative opinion revealed multifaceted problems, such as political dissent from the USAMGIK and its flawed language policy. From the perspective of Wodak and Reisigl’s (2001) proposed Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), it can be explained as interdiscursive relationships among discourses about Korean military interpreters and the USAMGIK. Through an analysis of these overlapping discourses, this study discusses their interconnectedness.

The coda /s/ is the most extensively studied phonological segment in Hispanic dialectology and sociolinguistics. However, the coda /s/ in Peruvian Andean Spanish has received relatively little attention. This study examines the variation in syllables and word-final /s/ in the city of Cusco, Peru. The statistical analysis of 2400 tokens from 24 sociolinguistic interviews reveals that the Spanish of Cusco is located within the conservative dialects with the predominant use of the sibilant [s] and that coda /s/ weakening is conditioned by linguistic factors, such as word position and the following phonological context. Additionally, younger speakers and those who have higher levels of education weaken codal /s/ more frequently than older generations and speakers with lower levels of education.