Korean Linguistics - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2025

Abstract

This study investigates an other-initiation of repair format commonly observed in Korean question-response sequences. Specifically, it focuses on the frequent use of “Na?” (‘Me?’) by recipients to confirm whether a preceding question is directed at them. Interestingly, this repair initiation appears regularly in two-party conversations and interviews, where there is typically little to no ambiguity about the question’s relevance to the recipient. Rather than managing genuine misunderstandings or listening issues, the study shows that this repair initiation serves as a resource to delay or avoid providing an immediate response. The preceding questions are often troubling, placing the recipient in a difficult position, or are sequentially disaligned, catching the recipient off guard. The repair initiator “Na?” serves as a buffer, mitigating the impact of difficult or abrupt questions, allowing the recipient time to formulate a response and facilitating a smoother transition to the next action.

Abstract

This study explores two discourse markers, well in English and isscanha in Korean, in the naturally occurring speech of English-speaking and Korean-speaking children. This corpus-driven analysis proposes a unified core meaning of the two markers as signaling contextual divergence from which varied meanings are derived according to the interactional environments. The interactional meanings of the two discourse markers are remarkably similar: they foreshadow topic shift, mark contrast in various ways, and insist on opinions. Children evidently employ the two markers for achieving discourse coherence, signaling interactional divergence, and enhancing their epistemic stance. The plufunctionality of the focal discourse markers indicates that children are developing interactional competence during the course of spoken language development. The corpus-driven analysis elucidates similarities in the meanings of the markers between the two linguistic groups, and thus adds evidence of interactional resources to the body of literature on spoken language acquisition.

Abstract

Sound symbolism is the idea that meaning can be encoded at a submorphemic level. Recent research argues that it is more pervasive than previously assumed. We contribute to this line of work by investigating cross-linguistic and language-specific patterns in Korean given names, finding that patterns match those found in other languages, except in the case of vowel height where there may be an interaction with Korean-specific sound symbolism. In native sound symbolic words, dark (higher) vowels are associated with largeness and light (lower) vowels, with smallness, contrary to the cross-linguistic vowel height-size symbolism where higher vowels are associated with smallness. We find that light-dark sound symbolism appears to override vowel height symbolism, but only for light or dark vowels. Our study adds to the growing body of literature demonstrating the presence of sound symbolism in given names and suggests that tensions between cross-linguistic tendencies and language-specific patterns manifest in them.

This article reviews Interfaces and features in Second Language Acquisition: A study on the acquisition of Chinese negation by English speakers and Korean speakers€119.999789811986284