Korean Linguistics - Current Issue

This paper explores the semantic features of Korean ideophones in newspaper headlines. This paper argues that (i) there is a strong relationship between the language-specific sound symbolic meanings – dark and light vowel polarity and the meanings of ideophones in newspaper headlines and event descriptions; (ii) ideophones are much more common in articles about the financial issues; (iii) ideophones which exhibit vowel alternation go through different semantic extension routes to those of other ideophones. The findings of the paper suggest that Korean ideophones have been lexically highly conventionalized and integrated into the language system.

This paper examines the linguistic features of Korean-language publications issued in the Russian Far East (RFE) between 1922 and 1937, the year all Koreans in the RFE were deported to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and tries to answer the questions “Can we speak of a separate ‘Soviet’ Korean written language, and if so, what were its defining characteristics?” Moreover, “If there was a ‘Soviet’ Korean written language, or at least the appearances of such, was this by design or by accident?” In order to answer these questions, the paper examines published materials in Korean from the RFE alongside metalinguistic statements about the Korean language and Korean language policy penned by relevant Korean intellectuals and Soviet commentators.

The main argument is that we can indeed detect an incipient case of ‘language making’ and the beginnings of a distinct ‘Soviet Korean’ written language congealing in the years leading up to the deportation of 1937. But this was more by accident than by design, and owed on the one hand to the peculiar constellation of language policies, Soviet Korean language and orthographic ideologies, and Korean dialect facts in the RFE, and on the other hand to the relative shallowness of Korean language standardization on the peninsula itself.

Any further developments in the way of Soviet Korean ‘language making’ were nipped in the bud by the deportation of 1937 and the discontinuation of Korean language education in schools from 1938. As a result, written Soviet Korean ceased to exist, and spoken Soviet Korean – Koryŏmal – became completed “unroofed”; the Soviet Koreans became a “rag doll nation” within the USSR, and spoken Soviet Korean/Koryŏmal became a “rag doll language.”

This paper describes word segmentation granularity in Korean language processing. From a word separated by blank space, which is termed an eojeol, to a sequence of morphemes in Korean, there are multiple possible levels of word segmentation granularity in Korean. For specific language processing and corpus annotation tasks, several different granularity levels have been proposed and utilized, because the agglutinative languages including Korean language have a one-to-one mapping between functional morpheme and syntactic category. Thus, we analyze these different granularity levels, presenting the examples of Korean language processing systems for future reference. Interestingly, the granularity by separating only functional morphemes including case markers and verbal endings, and keeping other suffixes for morphological derivation results in the optimal performance for phrase structure parsing. This contradicts previous best practices for Korean language processing, which has been the de facto standard for various applications that require separating all morphemes.