Earticle

Korean telephone conversations havedrawn some attention albeit not extensively. However, few have paid criticallyanalytic attention to adjacency pair sequences in Korean telephone call closings,one of the key constructs in Conversation Analysis (CA). For this reason, thepresent study examines the applicability of the adjacency pair to Korean telephonecall closings. To do so, it presents some counterevidence against the applicabilityof the unrevised notion of adjacency pair. First, the closing sequence in Koreanis neither lexically repetitive nor interactionally reciprocal like that in the (NorthAmerican) canonical format due to the consistent occurrence of"acknowledgement tokens" (Jefferson, 1984), which do not constitute a part ofa legitimate adjacency pair (Deng, 2008). Second, some Korean telephone callclosings have "three-part exchanges" (Tsui, 1989). The evidence against anadjacency pair in favor of a three-part exchange hinders a direct application ofthe adjacency-pair model to Korean telephone call closings. Subsequently, thepresent study revisits Han's (1998) theoretically uncritical, yet otherwiseilluminating study in light of the two findings above. It points out the problemswith the quantification of adjacency pairs in Korean telephone call closingsbecause her study takes into account neither acknowledgement tokens northree-part exchanges. Overall, then, the present study illustrates that the adjacencypair in Korean telephone call closings might not be the best microanalyticconstruct to explain the closing data. The theoretical and pedagogical implicationsof the findings are also discussed.

This study investigates phonetic characteristics of '-yo' particle in Korean,whose grammatical function is basically similar to the declarative particle '-ta'. The '-yo' particle follows the verb at the end of a sentence and it can be attachedto sentence medial non-verbal elements. Interestingly, the apparent '-yo'duplication is legal only in the presence of sentence-final '-yo'. This conditionleads us to an assumption that the medial '-yo' is linked to the sentence finalparticle at a certain linguistic level. Our main goal is to investigate to whichextent the phonetic characteristics of sentence medial '-yo' particle are comparableto those of the sentence final one. Speech data were collected from 9 femaleinformants in a laboratory setting and our measurements include pitch andtemporal dimensions (e.g., syllable lengthening and pause duration). We found(1) that the two '-yo' particles are phonetically similar to each other in termsof the types of boundary tone associated and the presence of lengthening, and(2) that they differ in the degree of lengthening and pause. Our phonetic resultscan help us understand the '-yo' duplication phenomenon.

The present study examined the time-related linguistic expressions in the Koreanlanguage and the English language. The way to perceive and to express timerelatedconcepts shows how abstract concepts are expressed through concreteconcepts. The existing research revealed that the semantic structures of the timeexpressions are closely connected to spatial concepts; this is supported by wordsand expressions that can express both time and spatial concepts across contexts. Considering that the way of using spatial concepts to express time-related ideasis metaphorical, the time expressions are fundamentally metaphorical. The studyused authentic data of such usage, which are examples obtained from a corpus,to analyze the difference between the two languages in terms of using spatialconcepts to express time-related ideas or events. The results showed that theKorean words for expressing spatial concepts are fully capable of expressingtime concepts. In English, however, the words to express both concepts of timeand space are relatively limited; the words for time concepts and the words forspatial concepts are not always interchangeable, although they are semanticallysimilar. Such differences between Korean and English can have significance inlanguage learning and intercultural communication.

English perfectives describe fully-completed events, whereas Korean perfectives describeboth partially- and fully-completed events. The capacity of perfectives to denotepartial completion interpretations is called the incompleteness effect which ariseonly for accomplishments with incremental themes. This paper examines Koreanspeakers' interpretations of English perfectives, precisely, whether they are ableto reject English perfectives with incomplete events, and whether their patternsvary across predicate types (accomplishments vs. achievements). The results showthat partially-completed events yield differences across predicate types. Unlikecontrols who rejected both predicates, Korean learners tended to rejectachievements but to accept accomplishments, as descriptions ofpartially-completed events. This paper explores the role of semantic and contextualfactors in interpreting response patterns found in the study.

In today’smulticultural world, language learners’ intercultural competence (Byram, 1997)in addition to their linguistic competence has been increasingly emphasized byresearchers. For Korean as a foreign language (KFL) learners, Korean popularculture seems to have potential to be a useful resource to develop their interculturalcompetence, in that the intense popularity of Korean popular culture in manyparts of the world (Toru, 2007) have an effect on Korean language learning. This study investigates to what extent Korean popular culture influences Koreanas a foreign language (KFL) learners’ intercultural competence and suggests afew pedagogical implications. Drawing from Pavlenko’s (2007) narrative analysis,I analyze content, context, and form of two KFL learners’ narratives. The analysesdemonstrate how learners can use diverse resources including Korean movies,dramas, and people in developing their intercultural competence by acquiringintercultural knowledge and undergoing the process of ‘decentering’ from theirown cultural perspectives. The participants narratives also shed light on possiblepedagogical application of Korean popular culture in Korean language teaching,in that teachers can incorporate popular culture and other steps to develop learners’intercultural development in classroom settings.

This study examines the principles and practices of politeness strategiesin email communications in Korean. Combining qualitative and quantitativemethod, the study analyzes forty four request made via email of two Koreanworkplaces: educational organizations and companies. The analysis appliesBrown and Levinson(1987) and Blum-Kulka (1989)'s politeness framework toinvestigate the linguistic and stylistic features of the emails in two institutionalsituations. The study found a general structure of request email and a rangeof various politeness strategies employed for the writing of the correspondence. Result reveals the general structure of email as 'Opening - RSM1 - RHA - RSM2 - Closing.' Also, it is found that far more requests are realized throughconventionally indirect strategies as well as negative politeness strategies thandirect and positive strategies. The study concludes that such a variety of politenessstrategies in writing relates strongly to Korean politeness values and business etiquette.

In quantitative studies, a randomsample is supposed to be randomly selected by probability sampling in sucha way that it represents a population. The statistical analysis of corpus frequencydata is based on a random sample model, which assumes that the corpus wasrandomly selected from the language. However, Kilgarriff (2005), Evert (2006),Goh (2011) show that typical corpus data severely violate the randomnessassumption. This paper aims to evaluate random sampling methods for corpuslinguistics and to explore their characteristics and applicability. They are evaluatedon the relative frequencies of 30 morphemes and the frequencies of all morphemetypes which occur in each sample observed from 1,000 resampling trials basedon how close each random sample is to the normal distribution and theZipf-Mandelbrot (Mandelbrot 1977) law. The present study creates three findings. First, systematic sampling at the unit of measurement, i.e. individual words froman entire corpus is a best way to construct random samples for corpus linguistics. Second, the closer the relative frequencies of 30 morphemes in a sample lieto the normal distribution, the closer the frequency distribution of all morphemetypes to the Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution. Third, It is an effective way to utilizerandom samples for solving problems that stem from different sample size anddata sparseness. Moreover, using them facilitates detecting rather big differencein word frequencies obtained from different corpora.