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Kim, Hansaem. 2015. Word Class Conversions in Korean Nouns and Adverbs. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 40-4, 601-618. The purpose of this paper is to separate class-conversional words, being limited to ‘Noun・ Adverb class-conversional words’ and to investigate their actual use aspects. It’s not only to admit the concept of ‘word class conversions’ but also to derive the specific range and list of class-conversional words so that word class conversions may be applied to lexicography or education practice. Although it’s seen that the nouns and adverbs of Korean language are firmly divided in form and function, they can be described as class-conversional words that one word functions as more than two parts of speech based on the flexibility of the meaning of part of words, and they are distributed throughout meaning classes that adverbs can have such as space, time, relations, properties, etc. There still remains a challenge to be solved, how to build a boundary even if giving the relation of master and servant to two parts of speech and reflecting on the arrangement order with the use distribution by part of speech. The use distribution by part of speech may be different depending on a corpus of the subject to be investigated and this is because we can’t find the use examples of all class-conversional words. It’s desirable to complement it with quantitative criteria when it’s determined to be ambiguous after setting up qualitative criteria. To determine ‘Class-conversional word’, we should approach it individually considering diachronic use aspects as well as grammar criteria such as meaning, function, form and distribution. (Yonsei University)

Park, Jinho. 2016. Contagion in Language. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 40-4, 619-632. Contagion is a phenomenon where a linguistic element is influenced by another and as a result becomes more similar to the latter. Contagion can occur in any of the three aspects of language, i.e. form, meaning or combinatorics. Its effects can be either temporary or permanent. It occurs because the two elements are stored at places close to each other in the mental lexicon. Contagion is a concept closely related to analogy and metonymy. (Seoul National University)

Ahn, Jae Hyun. 2015. L1 Korean L2 English Learners' Overpassivization Errors with Unaccusative Verbs. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 40-4, 633-660. Second language learners have had difficulties with verb acquisition, especially unaccusative intransitive verbs and it is because unaccusative verbs have featured properties which are distinguished from unergative verbs. From the second language learners’ perspective, it is very difficult for them to differentiate these two classes of verb and use them correctly. The primary purpose of this research is to study the overpassivization errors of unaccusative verbs by L1 Korean L2 English learners using Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (Sorace, 2000) which is based on Unaccusative Hierarchy (Sorace, 1993a, b, 1995). Four unaccusative verbs in four different subtypes in the hierarchy were selected and 108 subjects in total from the 9th and 11th grade took a grammaticality judgment test. This study found that 1) the participants made fewer errors with the unaccusative verbs as the rank of the verbs in the hierarchy went up, 2) the four verbs which were categorized as the same subtype depending on their unaccusativity showed significant differences, and 3) there was no statistically significant difference in the test results between the 9th and 11th graders. The reasons for these findings were also investigated and recommended teaching methods are suggested at the end of this paper. (Korea University)

Lim, Dongsik. 2015. On Korean Auxiliary Verb ‘-(e)cita’: an l-syntax Approach. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 40-4, 661-673. This paper aims to present the distribution of Korean auxiliary verb ‘-(e)cita’, and analyze it in the view of lexicon-syntax (l-syntax, Hale and Keyser 2002, Zubizarreta and Oh 2007, among many others). Specifically, following Lim and Zubizarreta (2012), here I argue that ‘-(e)cita’ is a spell-out form of the functional head of directed motion constructions. I also argue that in this analysis we can explain both the distribution of -(e)cita’ and its meaning, on the one hand, and its modal meaning (specifically possibility), on the other hand. (Hongik University)

Chung, Eugene & Kang, Beom-mo. 2015. Semantic Characteristics of Gender-specific Nouns and Their Related Words. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 40-4, 675-702. This paper aims to study gender concepts described in news articles by examining gender-specific words and their related words. Gender is a socio-cultural component of male and female identity that shapes how a person lives and interprets the world around them. News articles report their lives and the language used in the articles reflects society. A gender-specific word refers to a word relating only to either males or females, such as man, woman, male, female. First, we compared related words from synonymous gender-referring words. Second, we considered antonymous gender-specific words and their related words. Finally, we explored a group of males and females to show general roles portrayed in the news articles for each gender. While inclusive related words show common properties of target words, exclusive related words represent unique properties of the target word. We classified related words with semantic domains distributed by SIL International (Moe 2013). The semantic domains allow us to capture gender roles and status in our society. The newspaper corpus is composed of 2.5 million news articles issued from 2000-2013 and the size is more than 500 million words (Kim et al., 2010). We extracted 100 related words per target word and then compared their relationships by using Pajek (Ver. 4.04). This study shows that men are expected to be interested in fashion and public oriented settings. Compared to men, women tend to be more complex; they are family-oriented, but also they are socially involved. (Korea University)

Chae, Hee-Rahk. 2015. A Comprehensive Syntactic Analysis of Korean [... V ... V] Expressions: Converb Constructions and Types of Gaps. Korean Journal of Linguistics 40-4, 703-746. This paper is an attempt to achieve the goal of providing a comprehensive analysis of Korean [... V1 ... V2] expressions. Under the assumption that these expressions can be divided into auxiliary predicate constructions, converb/adverbial constructions (CCs) and idiomatic constructions, we focus on the analysis of CCs in this paper. CCs constitute a type of modifier-modified constructions: The unit containing V1 has an adverbial function of modifying the unit containing V2. Compared with serial verb approaches, we could provide a systematic and comprehensive analysis of relevant data. As there are no morphological/syntactic criteria to define a set of data as serial verb constructions in Korean, scholars set up a variety of different sets of data as their assumed serial verb constructions. While providing our analysis of CCs, under the spirit of mono-stratal approaches, we have looked at the nature of various types of gaps. By recognizing the existence of “inferential gaps” we could explicate the status of explicit NP objects in CCs. Within our system, we could also provide a proper analysis of the connective -ko, which shows several different meanings/functions. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)