Earticle

The aim of this study is to investigate ways to introduce a construct of ‘pragmatic competence’ into assessment tools for Korean as a second/foreign language. Taking TOPIK, which is widely recognized as the most representative Korean assessment tool, as a concrete case, this study critically reviews the literature, both on TOPIK as well as on Korean interlanguage pragmatics with a focus on acquisition and assessment studies for the purpose of re-understanding the concept of pragmatic competence and identifying what to consider for its incorporation into an assessment tool. Drawing on LoCastro(2012)’s classification of the concept of pragmatic competence into sub-factors and the available literature on assessment of pragmatic competence for Korean as a first or second/foreign language, this study suggests a preliminary assessment framework as an attempt to reset the assessment categories of TOPIK. It is hoped that the suggested assessment framework would undergo empirical evaluation to become a reliable and valid assessment tool for learners of Korean as a second/foreign language.

This study aims at analyzing the macroscopic trends of language, social, and cultural changes by tracing aspects of language through the 'Trends 21' corpus, which is constitute of four major Korean newspaper articles (The Chosun Ilbo, The Dong-A Ilbo, The JoongAng Ilbo, The Hankyoreh) for the past 14 years from 2000 to 2013. For this purpose, we examined the frequency patterns of 6,000 common nouns that appeared more than 7,000 times in the corpus. As a result, we found out that nouns related to food, leisure, fashion, and consumers are consistently increasing. In contrast, we found the characteristics that many nouns related to 'performance' and 'art' have a decreasing frequency pattern. Also, 'construction' and 'book' related nouns show increasing trennd over a period of time and then have decreasing trend. On the other hand, for the social trends analysis we examined some nouns related to 'emotion', the prominent changes of co-occurrence words about 'happiness' and 'communication' have been observed. This study has a limitation in that we handle only common nouns with high frequency, but has its significance in that tries to capture social and cultural trends through changes in the specific language aspects.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the distinctive characteristics of the noun distribution in the Korean adnominal case construction, namely, the 'N1-ui N2' construction. As a methodological framework, we adopt a collostructional analysis, including a covarying collexeme analysis, which is a statistically sophisticated methodology couched within the tenets of the Constructional Grammar (Stefanowitsch 2013, Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003, Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004, Hoffmann & Graeme 2013). The main analysis proceeds in the following steps: We first extract all the adnominal case constructions from a 11 million word Korean corpus, called the Sejong Semantic corpus, and identify N1 and N2 from each example. Then we apply the collostructional analysis, measuring the Association Strength of each N1 word to the N1 position, and each N2 word to the N2 position. We also measure the Association Strength for the covarying collexeme relations between N1 and N2 in each pair. We provide the top most ranked items in each of the three lists and discuss their syntactic and semantic characteristics. It is found that the group of nouns that characteristically appear in the N1 position cover various noun types like dependent nouns and proper names as well as regular nouns. Semantically the top ranked nouns tend to be of the agent types like people and social institutions. On the other hand, the distinctive group of nouns that rank highest in the N2 position mostly include regular nouns that are related to parts or properties of some objects. Finally, the highest ranked N1-N2 pairs typically form conventionalized and idiomatic expressions.

It is important to analyze and differentiate between neologism and mainstream language. Neologism flourishes where languages evolve. Since the reform and opening-up, with the rapid cultural exchanges with other countries, Chinese Language has produced a large number of new words. This paper discussed the meaning of neologism and characteristics of mainstream language. Once invented, new words have to go through a tough process for getting accepted into mainstream language. New words must gain people’s interest and become frequently used. They that survived finally evolve into the common words. Those neologism words not widely used have perished over and with the advent of internet, many internet slang words are created. Internet acronyms, jargon and abbreviations are key characteristics of online language. Shortening of a word is much common among internet users. The internet full of neologism describes a disruption of grammatical structures and it is responsible for contributing to the ruining of the language. Grammatical errors must be avoided. In this regard, language, must be standardized and regulated under strict procedures.