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This study examines the principles and practices of politeness strategiesin email communications in Korean. Combining qualitative and quantitativemethod, the study analyzes forty four request made via email of two Koreanworkplaces: educational organizations and companies. The analysis appliesBrown and Levinson(1987) and Blum-Kulka (1989)'s politeness framework toinvestigate the linguistic and stylistic features of the emails in two institutionalsituations. The study found a general structure of request email and a rangeof various politeness strategies employed for the writing of the correspondence. Result reveals the general structure of email as 'Opening - RSM1 - RHA - RSM2 - Closing.' Also, it is found that far more requests are realized throughconventionally indirect strategies as well as negative politeness strategies thandirect and positive strategies. The study concludes that such a variety of politenessstrategies in writing relates strongly to Korean politeness values and business etiquette.

This paper analyzes the trends of the studies on particle errors for Chinese Korean learners and examines the results of the research so far. Based on this, this paper aims to present the future research task of particle errors analysis. The papers subject to analysis are 90 theses and dissertations of the degree and 43 articles of the academic journal, which are total 133 articles of the study, and in this paper, the research trends were analyzed in detail by study timing, study data (size and type), study target (proficiency, learning environment), study content (by particle, by error type). As a result, among the field of error research for Chinese learners, research on particles has been ongoing steadily, and the target data has mostly been centered on written materials. Specifically, error studies on case markers accounted for the largest portion and most studies were found to be error types based on the determination of the results. Future studies on particle errors require studies to observe changes in error patterns according to proficiency and to identify the cause of particle errors.

This study aimed to address the following questions: (1) whether participating in both output and input activities promotes learning Korean grammar and vocabulary more effectively than receiving input only; (2) whether the effects of comprehensible output on learning Korean grammar and vocabulary vary in accordance with oral and written output modes; and (3) whether the linguistic aspects that second language learners focus on are different when they are speaking versus when they are writing. Twenty Korean as a second language adult learners participated in the experiment. Only the experimental group (n = 10) performed dictogloss tasks that required producing spoken and written outputs while the control (n = 10) did not. A follow-up recall questionnaire was given to the experimental group in order to investigate their conscious focus according to the output mode. The results revealed that producing output activity contributed to learning grammar and vocabulary, but there was no statistically significant difference between the effects of oral and written output. Also, the result of the recall questionnaire showed that learners focused more on syntactic processing than on semantic processing when they produced output regardless of its mode. The findings of this study suggest that producing comprehensible output facilitates acquiring target language form by inducing learners to focus on syntactic analysis beyond semantic analysis and that the effect of comprehensible output should be identical both in producing oral and written language.

The following research selected five adjectives of 가엾 다, 딱하다, 불쌍하다, 안쓰럽다, 안타깝다 among 안타깝다-type adjectives of emotion using thesaurus and frequency in order to examine the relations of their co-occurrence nouns by constructing a network of their relations. The target words that were extracted based on the corpus and the degree of relevance of the co-occurrence words were measured by t-score, through which any coincidental results in the relations between the adjectives of emotion and the co-occurrence nouns were excluded. Furthermore, the degree of similarity of the adjectives of emotion was also measured by dividing the relations of the network between the adjectives of emotion and the co-occurrence nouns into the top counts of 10, 30 and 50. As a result, the more co-occurrence words were shared, the higher the degree of similarity was, as consequently, the less co-occurrence words were shared, the lower the degree of similarity was. Concurrently, similarities were discovered in that the adjectives 가엾다, 불쌍하다, 안쓰럽다 primarily co-occurred with nouns related to family such as 'father, mother, husband, wife, younger sibling' while the adjectives 딱하다, 안타깝다 co-occurred with nouns such as 'story, news, circumstance, reality'. This research further examined the aspects and the similarities on how these five adjectives of emotion were used in Korean language textbooks. Given the fact that Korean language textbooks target foreigners, the usage of typical co-occurrence words was expected. However through the research, it was verified that there was a considerable difference in the co-occurrence words from the words that were present on newspapers. One of the reasons for the difference can be related to the fact that we used the corpus from newspaper articles.

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 paper aims to investigate the acquisition of Korean non-terminal suffix -ess- in conjunctive clauses with a view to finding how interlanguage tense/aspect morphology is acquired by Korean second language (KSL) learners. Korean connectives agglutinate to the medial verb and tense-aspect-modality (TAM) marking occurs in between the two: connectives and medial verbs. The point, for this paper, is the fact that TAM suffixation is deficient because it varies in the presence/absence of TAM elements depending on the connectives. For this research I categorized the connectives into three types depending on the temporalities when the obligatory past or perfective contexts are given: 1) that never take -ess-, 2) that unconditionally take -ess-, 3) that selectively take -ess-. Thirty six English speakers between the ages of 18 and 27 years participated in the study. For collection of data, written questionnaire acceptability judgment task was used. The task included both 24 target items and 24 distracter items. -ese and -lyeko was easy for most participants. By contrast, -taka and -umyen shows low accuracy rates. In terms of the connectives including -nuntey and -ciman that unconditionally take the suffix, the scores was located between the two types. The results suggest that the learners perceive the suffix -ess- as a homogeneous past tense marker and they memorized the use of -ess- as a declarative knowledge.

Readability is commonly defined as a statistical scale for measuring the ease of reading and understanding a text. In this paper, we propose that paragraph length, sentence length, and word length are applicable to readability metrics for Korean texts. A correlation between these readability metrics and text levels is statistically analyzed using correlation analysis and simple and multiple linear regression analyses based on data as found in Korean learning materials. Paragraph length and sentence length show a steady upward slope with increasingly higher learning levels, while word length has a downward sloping relationship with the elementary level only. This correlation can also be applied to materials evaluation focused on the arrangement of learning levels and chapters with respect to readability. This applicability is demonstrated by two statistical methods. First, cluster analysis is the assignment of a set of texts by level or by chapter into subsets sharing similar readability scales to evaluate materials arrangements in accordance with readability scales. Second, regression model with a breakpoint (Baayen 2008) divides a linear relation of readability scales into two models having a different slope so that we can explore a trend change of readability scales in materials.

This study investigates Koreans' overt and covert language attitudes towards the Jeju dialect. In order to analyze both overt and covert attitudes, direct (survey questionnaire) and indirect (matched-guise test) methods were used together. There were a total of 90 subjects, 30 of whom were speakers of Jeju dialect and 60 of whom were speakers of other Korean regional dialects: central dialect, Gyoungsang dialect, and Jeolla dialect. After all the questionnaires were completed, the results were compiled and subjected to statistical testing (paired t-test or Wilcoxon's signed-ranks test). The study revealed that Jeju dialect users regard their own dialect as a language with high solidarity and low status when their overt and covert attitudes were investigated. Also, it was confirmed that other dialect users label Jeju dialect as a language with low solidarity and low status when their overt attitude was analyzed. However, when their covert attitudes were analyzed, it turned out that they feel Jeju dialect is a language with low status and neutral level of solidarity. There was a subtle difference between Jeju dialect users’ overt and covert language attitudes in regard to status. This might have been caused by Jeju dialect users’ radical perception change towards Jeju dialect. As for the other dialects users, there was a difference between their overt and covert language attitudes in respect to solidarity. Their prejudice against Jeju dialect is likely to be a reason for this discrepancy.

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.