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Kim, Dongmin. 2013. Self-representation of identity: A Case of a Korean Family. Language Information. Volume 17. 05-22. This paper aims to research ethnic identity of a Korean-American family using MCA (membership categorization analysis) of Sacks (1992) in their discursive conversations. The participants signal their ethnic identities by categorizing addressee, themselves and third person referents. A positioning process is involved in the categorization with various discursive identities (Goffman, 1981), such as speaker, hearer and third person referent and also with a variety of social identities, such as a woman, mother, and Korean or American. Sacks (1972, 1979, 1992) divided the MCA into two in that identities are established in part through MCD (membership categorization devices) that serve to characterize a participant as a member of a certain social group, and through CBA (category-bound activities), which categorize participants indirectly by indexing typical activities bound to categorizations. Participants utilize labeling that is the discursive practice of producing explicit membership categorizations that are locally occasioned in talks. A category occurred in an interaction assigns a person to a particular social group. In fact, speakers exhibit their attitudes toward ethnicity in question by categorizing and describing ethnic characteristics and stances, and allude category terms through indirectly indexing membership categories. As immigrants encountered with difficulties to maintain their ethnic identity, assimilation takes its toll on one hand. Resistance, however, to the cultural pressure of the resident country leads them to have a unique type of ethnic identity on the other hand. This article examines how a Korean family employs MCD and CBA as self-representation for identities-in-practices. I will illustrate how, in conjunction with other resources, the participants show their identities in talk as a device which represents membership categories.

Pyun, Danielle O., Chung, Miri K. & Choi, Ho Jung. 2013. KFL learners’ acquisition of Korean locative particles: A corpus-based contrastive interlanguage analysis. Language Information. Volume 17. 23-46. Adopting the contrastive interlanguage analysis methodology, this study investigates KFL (Korean as a Foreign Language) learners’ acquisition of Korean locative case particles. A learner corpus compiled from eighty-seven intermediate learners of Korean was compared with a native speaker corpus on the frequency distribution of the five semantic categories of the Korean locative case (i.e, static location, dynamic location, time, goal, and source). In addition, learner errors on the use of locative case particles were quantified and examined according to the five semantic categories. The results of this study showed that KFL learners’ use of locative case particles substantially deviated from native speakers’ usage in frequency. Learners’ inaccurate and limited use of locative case particles were attributed to such factors as L1 transfer, overgeneralization, prior input, and interlanguage development.

Son, Young-Suk. 2013. Factors Influencing the Distribution of Japanese Plural Suffixes -tachi and -ra: A Study Employing the “Talk Show Multimedia Corpus”. Language Information. Volume 17. 47-72. This study examined which factors were significantly associated with Japanese speakers’ choice of the plural suffixes -tachi (たち) and -ra (ら), which resemble each other closely in meaning and are commonly seen in first-person plural pronouns such as watashi-tachi (わたし たち), watashi-ra (わたしら), boku-tachi (ぼくたち) and boku-ra (ぼくら), all meaning ‘we’. To do so, the study employed an intra- and extra-linguistic perspective based on the Talk Show Multimedia Corpus. The results revealed the following facts: The distribution of -tachi and -ra differed according to several intra-linguistic factors: the type of personal pronoun used with the suffix, the referents, and the content of the utterance, among others. Specifically, watashi and ore (おれ) ‘I’ are mainly used with -tachi, and boku ‘I’ with -ra. Further, -tachi is chosen when the referent of a personal pronouns includes all listeners, while -ra is frequently chosen when it does not. Finally, only -ra is used in honorific expressions, which in Japanese convey a meaning of downgrading of the speaker’s own status and that of people from their group or those with whom they are associated as compared to listeners. In the future, if the Multimedia Corpus can be improved to incorporate material other than that from television talk shows, it should be possible to comprehend the factors on the basis of which speakers select -tachi and -ra in colloquial Japanese, in more detail and from various perspectives, including speaker attributes that cannot be fully considered here because of the insufficient number of tokens.

Yoon, Jae-Sook & Lee, Han-Seop. 2013. Japanese Vocabulary Education for Effective Understanding of Japanese Culture. Language Information. Volume 17. 73-92. This paper analyzes the differences in basic vocabulary for Japanese and foreigners as an attempt to effectively understand Japanese culture through Japanese vocabulary education. Suggestions are made for the development of Japanese vocabulary education to enable effective understanding of Japanese culture based on an analysis of differences by target learners. The data presented in this paper are collected from vocabulary educations for Japanese native speakersand learners of Japanese Section 1 introduces the topic and Section 2 outlines basic vocabularies for Japanese native speakers and those for learners of Japanese. Section 3 first classifies basic vocabularies according to their characteristics and then, analyzes each subcategory. The order of the analysis is as follows: common vocabularies, vocabularies included only for Japanese native speakers, vocabularies included only for learners of Japanese. Section 4 examines their semantic characteristics based on buruigiihyou and summarizes differences. In section 5, it proposes new direction for vocabulary eduction for learners of Japanese. Section 6 concludes the paper and argues for need for change from Kango-centered vocabulary education to Wago-centered vocabulary education for learners of Japanese. This study found that vocabulary education for Japanese learners emphasized wako predicates, whereas that for foreigners focused more on kango nouns. It is important to teach both kango and wako as vocabulary for foreigners, so as to enhance their understanding of Japan and Japanese culture. Consistent efforts to include wako predicates in vocabulary education will not only lead to a better grasp of practical Japanese, but also contribute to an effective understanding of Japanese culture.

Choe, Jae-Woong & Song, Ji-Young. 2013. The Topical Classification of Essays by College Student English Learners Using Hierarchical Clustering. Language Information. Volume 17. 93-115. In this study, we report on a set of experimentations for, and a successful completion of, the automatic topic classification of 3286 English essays (YELC) written by college level English learners in Korea. We adopted Hierarchical Agglomeration Clustering for our purpose. In order to find the best combination of distance measures and algorithms for hierarchical clustering, we first selected 100 essays, and then calculated precision rate on the basis of the subset of essays for each of the 15 combinations of 5 distance measures and 3 methods provided in R implementation of ‘Dist’ and ‘hclust’. As a result, the combination of ‘correlation’ and ‘ward’ method was chosen as the optimal one for our chosen corpus, which was applied to ten sets of randomly selected 100 essays for further validation. As a final step for topic classification, the ‘correlation’-‘ward’ combination was applied to classify the whole corpus into six topics. The precision rate was estimated to be 98.7%, a quite decent one for our purpose. We then conducted a Key word analysis on the six topic-groups, thereby showing some distributional characteristics of the words used in each group.

Xu, Haixia & You, Seok-Hoon. 2013. Acquisition of ‘V-V’ resultative construction by Korean learners of Chinese language. Language Information. Volume 17. 117-148. In Chinese, “predicate + resultative” construction (RC, hereafter) are quite productive. Yannong Wang (1987) and Yuehua Liu (2005) pointed out that it is difficult for second language learners to acquire Chinese RC’s. Recent researches on L2 Chinese acquisition (Hui Che 2006, Xueyin Liang 2008, etc), also pointed out similar difficulties for leaners to acquire Chinese RC’s. Until recently, most studies on the acquisition of Chinese RC’s, especially that of Korean learners’, had focused on error analysis and categorization of error types rather than on acquisition of RC’s by Korean-speaking learners of Chinese. Chinese RC’s are not simple to acquire due to its complicated semantico-syntactic properties. The learners are expected to understand the interface between syntax and semantics to acquire them. This paper has conducted an empirical study to investigate the influences of native language of Korean-speaking learners of Chinese in their acquisition of Chinese RC’s. This study includes an acceptability judgment test of Chinese ‘V-V’ RC consisting of a monosyllabic verbal predicate and a monosyllabic resultative verb.