Earticle

This study examines the transition of nasal consonants in Japanese language textbooks during the Chosun Dynasty based on a review of Japanese, Chinese and Christian literature. In order to indicate Japanese nasal consonants, in Japanese language textbooks in Chosun Dynasty, Korean nasal consonants such as “ㄴ” and “ㅁ”, or a vowel “ㅇ” is placed as a last syllable in front of consonants, “ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅿ․ㅈ, ㅂ,” which was evidence for the existence of nasal consonants in the Chosun Dynasty. The content analysis of the nasal consonants in the Japanese language textbooks between 15 and 18 century also shows that Japanese nasal consonants, ザ and バ among ガ․ザ․ダ․バ group had become weak in the middle of 17th century and disappeared at the end of 18th century. ガ and ダ group, however, still existed by the end of 18th century even though their sounds became weak, which proved that nasal sound existed. This study contributes to improve understanding evolutionary change of nasal consonants based on empirical evidence from Japanese language textbooks.

The aim of this paper is to discuss grammaticalization process ofthe three Korean sentence endings -canha, -ketun, and –nikka through the reviewof previous literature. These sentential-end markers in modern Korean historicallyevolved from connective markers (Lee & Park 1999; Koo & Rhee 2000). Thereview shows the evolution of these grammatical forms with new functions. Theoverview of studies also suggests that Korean as an agglutinativeSubject-Object-Verb language with rich morphological devices has a uniquepattern of grammaticalization contrary to that which occurs in Indo-Europeanlanguages, which are widely examined in grammaticalization studies.

This paper aims to investigate morphologicalcharacteristics distinguishing nouns and verbs in the noun-verb pairs that aresemantically and morphologically related. The number of words analyzed in thispaper are 561 nouns and 434 verbs. The criteria that distinguish the nouns andverbs were: 1) number of movements, 2) the existence or nonexistence ofmouthing, 3) distribution. For movements verbs are produced as single movementand slow movement. The findings of verbs are consistent with those of previousstudies. Also, Nouns were produced as single movement and totalling at highfrequency. The nouns differed in that for other sign languages, nouns wereproduced with repetition movement. The mouthings accompanied the productionof 50% of the nouns, and 12% of the verbs. The nouns had mouthings muchmore often rather than the verbs. The distribution became an important criterionwhen the mouthing was not accompanied or when it was difficult to discriminatebetween nouns and verbs just depending on the number of movements. Withthe nouns, the distribution was the second criterion, with the first criterion beingthe mouthing. With the verbs, the distribution was the second criterion followingthe number of movements. Finally, we suggest the duration of movement ofverbs is related to the aspectual meaning of the verbs.

In human language, a single linguistic form can be used to convey different meanings. One of the most representative forms which involve such a relation between form and meaning in Korean is the verbal inflectional morpheme (e/a)ss. This morpheme is responsible for the past tense by default, but in more than a few cases it does not necessarily denote an event that happened in the past. This article probes into the past tense morpheme in Korean (e/a)ss in a way of comparative corpus linguistics. In order to create the findings using a data-based method, the present study explores a bilingual parallel corpus in which a sentence in one language is aligned to the corresponding sentence in the other language. The parallel data the current work makes use of is the Sejong English-Korean Bilingual Corpus. Exploring the parallel data, this corpus study provides a quantitative analysis of (i) which linguistic form in English the past tense morpheme in Korean corresponds to and (ii) which verbs are more frequently associated with the non-past meanings when they are combined with (e/a)ss.