Earticle

In the aspect of big data research, LG Economic Research Institute & Media Daum (2010) presents Korean society's concerns in 2010 (August 2009 - July 2010) based on the ranking of news articles and search terms and market statistics. This is based on data which would reflect Korean social popularity. The purpose of this paper is to examine how changes in word frequencies over time in newspaper corpora reflect social concerns analyzed by LG Economic Research Institute & Media Daum (2010). We investigate frequency trend charts of words related to social concerns from the Trend 21 corpus composed of Chosun Ilbo, Dong-A Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo, and Hankyoreh newspaper articles for 14 years from 2000 to 2013. This paper shows advantages of using newspaper corpora in linguistics, humanities and social sciences, and big data research, and suggests the importance of observing changes in word frequencies over time for exploring social concerns and trends.

The aim of this research is two-fold. I first attempt to compare linguistic terminologies in Chinese and Korean, and then implement a Korean-Chinese parallel database, which contain linguistic terms in Korean juxtaposed with their corresponding Chinese expressions. To do so, I extracted major terminologies used in the field of Korean linguistics based on their frequency and identified how they are translated in Chinese. I go one step further to demonstrate a three-way comparison: comparing how two different countries, China and Taiwan, use linguistic terminologies against their Korean counterparts. The outcome of this result has practical import; it can be used for researchers and students alike in Greater China, who are interested in linguistics and/or the Korean language as it is. I also discuss the demand of building a three-language- database, Korean-English-Chinese, to enhance the researcher’s understanding of terminologies in these languages, which often can be hindrance for researchers who are not familiar with two of the three aforementioned languages.

EMI (English as a Medium Instruction) classes have been expanding for all university fields with the increasing demand of the language ability to use academic English. In this line of demands, effective academic lectures with a special focus on Discourse Markers (DMs) have recently been researched as one of the important features for learners’ effective comprehension in a foreign language setting since the ability to use DMs naturalistically can signal learners’ potential development of interactional skills. In this paper, we investigate distributional characteristics of DMs found in general (TED talks) and academic lectures (MICASE) and provide insights to facilitate DMs for academic listening comprehension in higher education. Our findings show firstly that spoken lectures use a limited group of DMs (out of 120 items) whose lexical load is further localized to few items, such as “and, so, but.” Secondly, more interpersonal DMs are found in general lectures than in academic ones. Finally, certain interpersonal DMs seem to characterize a lecture style whether it is monologic or interactional. The findings reported in this paper have some pedagogical implications for English learners as well as lecturers designing EMI courses.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the novel types of subjunctive complementizer nka in Korean. Among the two types of interrogative complementizer variants of the ordinary interrogative complementizer ci and the modalized interrogative complementizer nka, we argue that nka is a lexicalized form of the epistemic subjunctive mood exponent appearing in subordinator C. Specifically, we show that the semantic function of nka creates epistemic weakening in subjective doxastic space and expresses speaker/subject’s epistemic uncertainty on the embedded question. Our claim will be further supported by corpus study by comparing different types of predicates selecting nka and/or ci. The theoretical implication of current study is two-folds: First, in Korean, interrogative can be another prerequisite of subjunctivity. Second, for the analysis of interrogative subjunctive, the inquisitive-based theory is untenable but nonveridicality can provide the general theory.

The purpose of this study is to investigate which factors influence the choice of English demonstratives and to examine Koreans’ use of English demonstratives. Two experiments were conducted in the research – one was to examine which factors decide the degree of focus, the concept used in the theory suggested by Strauss (1992) as one of the criteria of demonstrative choices, and the other was to explore whether Korean students know that the focus of entities as well as distance affects the use of English demonstratives. For both experiments, task-type questionnaires were used and the results were analyzed using chi-square statistics. In Experiment 1, native English speakers and Korean adults who are advanced learners of English participated. The study indicated that both of the groups were influenced most by ownership among the three factors, ownership, meaningfulness, and price. Experiment 2 was carried out subsequently to investigate if the concept of ownership in fact influence Korean high school students’ use of English demonstratives. The results indicated that ownership, the factor which was used as a substitute of focus in this experiment, did not affect high school students’ choices much. These results suggest that they might not be yet aware of the fact that not only distance but also other aspects such as ownership can have an impact on the choice of English demonstratives.