Earticle

This study is to analyze the sports metaphor used in political discourse in depth and to examine the relationship between sports and politics, the types of sports metaphors, and the implications of sports metaphors. Politicians use various metaphors to maximize their political effects, and the language that constitutes political discourse is a key tool and weapon for achieving political communication and purpose. In fact, politicians often use the metaphor to emphasize major issues as a tool to make abstract issues easier for the general public, and all political acts are natural in that they inevitably involve language. This study analyzes the metaphorical expressions used by politicians in political discourse based on Lakoff & Johnson’s(1980) conceptual metaphor theory In fact, we focus on metaphors with high frequency [POLITICS IS A GAME], [POLITICS IS A RACE], [POLITICS IS BOXING], and [POLITICS IS FOOTBALL, BASEBALL, OR BASKETBALL] and examine how political metaphors are conceptualized. Finally, we look into some implications of sports metaphors in political discourse.

The aim of the current study is to analyze the contents of test items from the written component of the secondary school English teacher recruitment exam from 2009 to 2021. Among the test items, only the items from the field of English education were collected, and in total, 137 test items were identified. The five different categories provided by the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation were used to analyze the items. The findings are as follows: 17(12.4%) test items were associated with second language acquisition; 16(11.7%) with materials development; 23(16.8%) with English assessment and English methodology; 43(31.4%) with listening, speaking, reading, and writing; and 15(10.9%) with grammar and vocabulary, respectively. Out of these categories, the 4 skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) were taken up the most, followed by English assessment and English methodology; second language acquisition; and materials development. With regard to the percentage of test items in the field of English education, the average percentage was 37.4%; and the school year which made up the largest portion was 2016 (47.5%) and 2020 (30%) the least. Implications and limitations were also discussed.

This paper investigates the semantic and pragmatic consequences of the adverbial nature carried by floating quantifiers in Korean. It is assumed in this paper that floating quantifiers in Korean carry the adverbial nature rather than the stranding one which relates the floating quantifiers with their head nouns in syntactic analysis. The adverbial nature of Korean floating quantifiers produces some semantic and pragmatic consequences. In other words, the adverbials in Korean often contribute to the production of semantic ambiguities and pragmatic ‘focus’ and ‘presentative’ function in the sentence information structures. The semantic consequences relate to the semantic ambiguity caused by floating quantifiers. The use of floating quantifiers causes the preferences for the partitive and/or distributive reading rather than exhaustive and/or collective reading, respectively. The pragmatic consequences of Korean floating quantifiers, however, relate to focus and presentative function. The focus function of floating quantifiers in Korean derives from preverbal focus universal hypothesis(Kim, 1985) in that the floating quantifiers stand close to verbs in the sentence-final position. The presentative function of floating quantifiers in turn derives from their usual preverbal positionings and their resultant focus status.

In this paper, we show the characteristics of advertisements and suggest that the figurative languages in advertising can be explained by Relevance Theory in Sperber and Wilson(1986). As one crucial role of advertisement aims or a communicative act that an advertiser may expect to persuade a consumer to purchase a particular product by way of mass-media, advertising will be regarded as a discourse act (or context). Sperber and Wilson maintains that people generally aim to achieve the most efficient improvement to their general representation of the world with the least cost in processing information. Relevance Theory plays an essential role in explaining human communication and enables us to recognize(or understand) the way that humans successfully communicate. Thus, we examine figurative languages in advertisements and prove the consistency between them and Relevance Theory.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of gender on Koreans' English vowel perception and production process in speech accommodation. The experimental analyses are composed of perception experiment (AXB test) and imitation production experiment (relative distance in relative vowel characteristics) for 24 college students with the Praat program and statistical program (R). The experimental data of perception-production was analyzed with the frequency and t-test analysis to identify the effect of gender on speech accommodation. As a result, there was no difference in the perception abilities of males and females in the perception experiment; whereas the male participants showed a stronger 'convergence' of speech accommodation than the female participants in the imitation production experiment. It could be potentially implied that the result of the findings is associated with perception limitations (the difference between the two language structures of Korean-English in terms of phonology and phonetics) and the influence of social factors (social-cultural norms psychology influences the linguistic characteristics of gender).

This study aims to explore how the vocabulary size and affective variables effect fluency in English speaking of Korean English learners. In total, 42 university students participated in the study and filled out the questionnaires developed to measure affective variables (WTC, learning motivation, self-efficacy) as well as EIT(Elicited Imitation Test for English speaking) and VST(Vocabulary Size Test). The result from multiple regression analysis revealed that both VST and affective factors were found to have a strong correlation with EIT. One-way ANOVA analysis showed that there are significantly statistical differences between the upper and lower groups in VST, affective variables and EIT. There are also statistical differences between the upper and lower groups in the degree of influence of affective factors, VST and EIT. In the upper group, VST and affective factors had a weaker influence on EIT whereas, in the lower group, they had a greater influence on EIT. Particularly the degree of influence of affective factors on the lower group was stronger than that of the upper group.

The aim of this study is to present a methodology with which a semantic prosody from a diachronic perspective can be analyzed. To achieve this goal, the analysis period was divided into the late Middle Korean, the Modern Korean, and the Contemporary Korean. It also revealed what criteria ‘더욱(Deouk)’ and ‘점점(Jeomjeom)’ were selected as research subjects, and how they were refined. Furthermore, the predicates collocated with the two nodes were divided into the form of ‘Verb, Adjective, Noun+is’, and the semantic prosody was analyzed in a context-dependent method. As a result, it was confirmed that the semantic prosody of the words is changing over time. In the late Middle Korean period and the Modern Korean period, there was no significant difference in the proportions of positive and negative semantic prosody of ‘더욱(Deouk)’, but it was found that the use of positive semantic prosody of ‘더욱 (Deouk)’ increased in the Modern Korean period. On the other hand, ‘점점(Jeomjeom)’ had a strong positive semantic prosody in the late Middle Korean period, but the ratio used as a negative semantic prosody gradually increased. Furthermore, in the Contemporary Korean period, it could be seen that the semantic prosody of ‘점점 (Jeomjeom)’ was reversed with a strong negative semantic prosody. Finally, it was also possible to confirm the difference in the detailed usage patterns of ‘더욱(Deouk)’ and ‘점점(Jeomjeom)’. These analysis results show that the semantic prosody, which has been mainly studied only from a synchronic perspective, can be sufficiently analyzed from a diachronic perspective, and as such produce results of significance and insight.

Na and ce in Korean are used by the speaker(S) to refer to himself/herself to the hearer(H), tantamount to the English I. Na is known to be used to H who is younger than, or subordinate or equal to S, whereas ce is used by S humbling himself/herself to H who is older than or superior to S. However, when S and H are not familiar with each other or are in a formal situation, a so-called strategic usage in the sense of Brown/Levinson (1987) and J. B. Lee (1998, 1999, 2011, 2012) is triggered, which will be the main topic of this paper. We analyze 30 episodes of one TV program and conduct an experiment with 57 participants, in order to observe which of na and ce is preferred in various strategic situations. Based on the results of the two studies, it will be proposed that ce is strongly preferred in strategic situations, which seems to show people’s desire to maintain politeness and thoughtful consideration bidirectionally, i.e., not only from S to H, but also from H to S.

This study aims to show the communicative effectiveness by using interrogative sentences as an indirect speech act conveying various meanings in the course of daily communication. First, yes-no questions with '不行吗?', '不可以嗎?', '不成吗?', etc. are often used to express politely meanings by lowering the speaker and treating the listener with respect. Second, wh-questions using '为什麽', '怎麽', '什麽', '誰', etc. are used to indirectly and euphemistically express the directive speech acts and the expressive speech acts that tend to threaten the listener's face. By expressing these speech acts indirectly and euphemistically the speaker can reduce not only the threat of the listener's face but also the listener’s stress and psychological burdens, through which the listener accepts the delivered contents. Third, A-not-A questions using ‘能 不能’, ‘好不好’, ‘可不可以’, etc are used to indirectly convey ‘proposal’, ‘request’, ‘protest’, etc. The negative situation is presented in order to show humility by giving the listener a chance for refusal and avoiding the loss of the speaker's face in case the listener refuses.

A parasitic gap, an illicit gap, is acceptable when it is dependent on a real gap and the parasitic gap construction containing two gaps is difficult to understand due to the structural complexity. Moreover, these constructions are very rare in Korean learners' input because they are not learned in L2 classes. This study aims to investigate Korean learners' syntactic knowledge and processing of parasitic gaps inside subject islands using an offline scalar judgement task and an online self-paced reading task. The offline task showed the sensitivity of the licensing constraint. The online task indicated that Korean learners computed the internal representation of the parasitic gap by applying the parsing principle and the strategy during reading the sentence, which was similar to native speakers' processing. Therefore, these results suggest that there exists the logical problem in the acquisition of parasitic gap constructions despite the poverty of the stimulus.

This study attempted to link continuous and dynamic articulatory information to categorical phonological feature representations through a neural network model. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model was used in the current paper, which is a type of recurrent neural network including temporal information connections. The test results of the LSTM model mapping muscular activation into phonological features show that (i) gradient values of phonological features are derived from the degree of activation of the tongue muscles, which determines the movement and shape of the tongue, and (2) the LSTM model can systematically capture vowels' co-articulatory effect on consonants.

This paper explores the syllable position of alveolar stop and glottal stop, and tries to reinterpret the principle of English glottalization with feature preservation constraints. Unlike the widely known view that glottalization is one of the allophones of voiceless alveolar stop, this study suggests that glottalization is the result of perceiving glottal stop due to the deletion of voiceless alveolar stop. Apart from glottalization of voiceless alveolar stop, glottal stop can also appear in front of the initial vowel which has a pause right before pronouncing it, and it has been considered different from the allophones of alveolar stop. However, based on the glottal stop before a syllable-initial vowel, from the phenomenon known as that alveolar stop is glottalized before syllabic consonant such as nasal or lateral sound, this paper assumes that there also exists glottal stop in front of those syllabic consonants. Because nasal or lateral has also high sonority like vowels, when they have an initial pause from deletion of alveolar stop, they can have glottal stop sound after the pause. Two perspectives, which glottal stop from glottalization is syllable-final and the one in front of a vowel is syllable initial, conflict with each other. This study, therefore, considers the former and the latter to be the same elements as a syllable-initial, explaining the principle with the view of feature preservation.

The purpose of the study is to investigate Korean EFL learners’ use of the first-person singular pronoun “I” in their argumentative essays. There has been a conflict between the perspectives of objectivity and personal preference in academic writing regarding the issues of using this pronoun by EFL learners. Furthermore, they might have great difficulty combining their own opinions with traditional objective styles of academic essays through realizing their identity in an argument situation. To this end, the study analyzes two learner corpora’s: Korean learner corpus(ICLE_Kr) and native learner corpus(LOCNESS) to describe functional patterns of the first person pronoun and its’ collocational networks. The results showed that Korean learners overused “I”, but the patterns of functions are similar to those of native learners. In particular, both groups often use the pronoun in situations of personal matters, but not when expressing opinions. However, there is a clear difference in using their identity. Korean learners have focused on emphasizing their personal opinion when they argue a controversial issue, while native learners tend to use the first person pronoun referring to universal and common property. Based on the findings, the study recommends that EFL learners consciously attend to authentic language such as corpus data to achieve the proper use of the first person pronoun.

Since the introduction of BERT, recent works have shown success in detecting when a word is anomalous given sentence context. Since likelihood score is not an appropriate tool in identifying the exact property of linguistic anomaly, Li et al. (2021) recently adopt Gaussian models for density estimation at intermediate layers of pretrained language models. They find that different English pretrained language models employ separate mechanisms to recognize different types of linguistic anomaly. In keeping with Li et al.‘s methodology, we probe whether Korean counterparts such as KoBERT and KR-BERT are sensitive to different levels of linguistic anomaly, just as English-based language models are. To investigate the issue concerned, we construct an experiment with a suite of test data involving morphosyntactic, semantic, and commonsense anomaly in Korean and apply the two Korean-based models to test relevant sentences. We find that KoBERT and KR-BERT show relatively higher surprisal gaps throughout layers when the anomaly is morphosyntactic than when the anomaly is semantic. By contrast, commonsense anomaly does not exhibit any surprisal gap in any layer. We thus report that, like their English counterparts, KoBERT and KR-BERT use different mechanisms to track the different types of linguistic anomaly.

This study investigates the acoustic properties of Korean stops in word-initial position produced by Jeju speakers and examines the effects of phonation type, place of articulation, and speaker’s gender on VOT, F0, H1-H2, and the spectral properties of the stop release bursts. The findings show that VOT, F0, the amplitude difference in the first harmonic and the second harmonic(H1-H2), and the amplitude intensity of a release burst for Korean stops contribute to the phonation type, whereas VOT and the four spectral moment analysis contribute to the place of articulation. That is, Jeju speakers employ the distinctive acoustic cues for the stop consonants in terms of phonation type and place of articulation. Aside from the fact that acoustic parameters of speech encode linguistic information, the present study suggests that F0, H1-H2, skewness, kurtosis, and the amplitude intensity of a release burst are employed to convey social information about a speaker’s gender. In particular, the present study suggests that the release burst of stops can convey social information as well as linguistic information.

Previous research has shown that revision is a factor mediating the effect of written corrective feedback(CF) on second language(L2) learners’ written accuracy. The purpose of the study is to extend the research in two ways. The first is to examine whether revision holds its mediating impact even when written CF targets highly complex structures such as the English hypothetical conditional. Second, the study explores whether revision interacts with other mediating factors such as L2 writing anxiety. A total of 105 Korean college students of English were assigned to six groups that differed in terms of anxiety level(low or high) and instructional treatment they received(written CF only, written CF plus revision, or no treatment). The participants produced four written texts through dictogloss tasks. The first, the third and the fourth one served as the pretest, the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest, respectively. The results revealed that revision increased the short-term effect of written CF given to the low-anxiety learners, which indicated that it had a mediating impact on the efficacy of written CF targeting highly complex structures over limited periods of time. However, the impact was not shown for the high-anxiety learners, demonstrating that there was interaction between revision and L2 writing anxiety.

This study aims to examine parents’ perceptions toward mobile learning and evaluate an English education app. Thirty-one Korean parents, whose children are attending an English kindergarten and have been using an app for over six months, were chosen. The questionnaire was conducted with a semi-structured interview. The results showed that parents perceived the positive influences of m-learning, especially in reading and listening. Without time and space constraints and arousing learners' interest were suggested as advantages of m-learning. 'Learning content' of the app also gained a high score, which contradicts the results of previous studies. The focus on the reading of the app made young children less interested in m-learning while parents were overall satisfied with the app's ability to improve learners' language skills. Due to the small sample size, it might be difficult to generalize the results. However, they will provide useful insights and information as to what we can do to help promote the use of education apps.

This paper examines the semantic categories of verb collocates of the prepositions around and about and considers the semantic relationship between those prepositions and their verb collocates. The study describes how to apply a systematic semantic tagging by the semantic category analysis program, Wmatrix, to the analysis of semantic characteristics of verb collocation with each preposition and how the results are reflected in explaining the semantic correlation between verb collocates and the two prepositions. The result of the analysis suggests that the semantic category of actual verb collocates of each preposition classified through Wmatrix supports the traditional cognitive semantic interpretation well, and the verb collocation information shows a very close correlation with the semantic information of the preposition.

As a grammatical category, the antipassive in English is often seen in the discourse but has not been widely studied in contrast to the passive. For one thing, the construction used to be regarded as being exclusive to ergative-absolutive languages. For another, the binary voice division in many traditional grammar books has precluded ESL and EFL learners from being exposed to fine-grained classification of voice construction. Given this, this paper aims to address the English antipassive construction from the perspective of cognitive grammar. It is argued that the antipassive has discrete features and is not confined to one single construction; instead, several constructions instantiate the antipassive in at least five ways: (i) object deletion or suppression, (ii) conative construction or preposition drop alternation, (iii) object incorporation, (iv) plural, indefinite, or non-referring objects, and (v) non-fact modalities. In terms of the prototypicality of the construction, type (i), type (ii), and type (iii) are more typical antipassives as they involve a shift of transitivity. In terms of continuous features, type (iv) and type (v) can be taken as non-typical antipassives or overlaps with the active in that they only exhibit the characteristics of the antipassive semantically. Thus, it is reasonable to say that both the active and antipassive are counterparts of the passive.