Against the Usage-based Approach to Substratum Transfer: Singapore English one

( Chonghyuck Kim ) 대한영어영문학회 2021 영어영문학연구 Vol.47 No.4

The pronominal one displays peculiar properties in Singapore English. Unlike one in Standard English which is mainly used as a pronominal, it has two additional productive functions; it is used to nominalize a phrase or emphasize (a part of) a sentence. In contact linguistics, these peculiar properties of Singapore English one are viewed as a consequence that results from a process known as substratum transfer, where the superstratum language, English, acquires non-English-like properties from the substratum languages spoken in the local environment, mainly Chinese languages in Singapore. In the literature, the standard assumption about substratum transfer, at least since Lefebvre (1998), is that it emerges through a merger of the lexicons of the superstratum and substratum languages, a lexicalist conception of substratum transfer which has its theoretical root in the generative grammar. Bao (2009) argues, however, that this standard generative conception of substratum transfer fails to account for Singapore English one, and proposes instead to adopt a usage-based approach to substratum transfer. Within this usage-based approach, substratum transfer has nothing to do with lexicons but with constructions. In a recent paper, Kim (2021) defends the lexicalist hypothesis by showing that all the major problems that Bao attributes to the lexicalist hypothesis are only apparent and not problematic. While Kim succeeds in defending the lexicalist hypothesis, he fails to show that it is superior to the usage-based approach. In this article, I compare Kim’s analysis with Bao’s point by point with the aim to show that Kim’s lexicalist hypothesis is superior. I argue that even the usage patterns of one, which have been used to support the usage-based approach, in fact turn out be a strong support for the lexicalist approach. (Jeonbuk National University)

Korean Question Particles Are Pronominals: A Case of Encoding Discourse Participants in the Syntax

Chonghyuck Kim 한국생성문법학회 2012 생성문법연구 Vol.22 No.4

This paper investigates the Korean question particles, namely ni, nya, na and ka, and claims that they are in fact pronominals such as you, I, and (s)he that refer to discourse participants in an interrogative context, in particular Hearer. Two pieces of empirical evidence are provided to support the claim. The first is morphological: ni and nya look the same as or very similar to (Korean) pronoun you; and na and ka have the same morphological shape as I and (s)he, respectively. The second has to do with the force of the question particles: ni and nya induce direct force requiring an answer from Hearer, whereas na and ka induce indirect force that does not demand an answer from Hearer. This difference in force between the two groups of particles is shown to follow from analyzing them as pronominals that encode information about who the questions in which they occur are directed to. If a question marked by ni or nya (you) is directed to Hearer, Hearer is required to answer. By contrast, if a question marked by na (I) is directed to Speaker, or one marked by ka (she/he) is directed to a third person, Hearer need not answer the question.

On the Korean Extrinsic Plural Marker

Chonghyuck Kim 현대문법학회 2013 현대문법연구 Vol.71 No.-

The Korean plural marker tul can be used in a peculiar way. It can not only attach to a nominal expression functioning as a usual plural marker, but it can also, rather unusually, attach to other types of phrasal category. Semantically, when used in the latter way, it brings to the discourse context a sense of distributivity which is rather weak – weak to the extent that truth conditions are sometimes unaffected by its presence. In this article, I derive these properties of extrinsic tul from two proposals: (i) extrinsic tul comes with a silent anaphoric element; and (ii) it conventionally implicates the existence of a distributive relation between the host phrase of tul and its plural antecedent.

The role of copula deletion on the emergence of a new grammatical feature

( Chonghyuck Kim ) 대한영어영문학회 2012 영어영문학연구 Vol.38 No.4

Since the influential work by Labov(1969), much attention has been paid to the cause of copula deletion, or the conditions that govern the deletion. This paper investigates a hitherto uninvestigated aspect of copula deletion, the impact of copula deletion on the emergence of new grammatical features in a contact language, drawing on data from Singapore English. In the literature on Singapore English, novel grammatical features such as using already as a perfective marker and one as an emphatic marker have been described as unrelated individual grammatical features that have emerged under the strong pressure of the substratum language, Chinese. I argue that the innovative grammatical features have arisen not because of the strong pressure from Chinese but because of copula deletion; that is, that they have emerged in the grammar of Singapore English because of the need to fill the grammatical void created by the loss of be. By tying together what have been characterized as unrelated phenomena as a bundle of phenomena that have emerged from the same source, copula deletion, the impact of copula deletion is shown to be non-trivial on the emergence of new grammatical features in a contact language. (National University of Singapore)

Child Negation in Korean

( Chonghyuck Kim ) 대한언어학회 2018 언어학 Vol.26 No.2

The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 26(2), 39-60. Korean children are known to optionally misplace the negative morpheme an when they form negative sentences. Instead of placing it immediately before a predicate, they sometimes put it in a position removed from the predicate. Hagstrom (2002) proposes that Korean children’s errors are not something new but just language-specific instantiations of the errors commonly made by child speakers of all languages in the Optional Infinitives (OI) stage. Following Wexler (1998), he argues that Korean child negation errors result from the conflict between three constraints―the Unique Checking Constraint, Realize Tense, and Realize Agreement. An important prediction that follows from his theory is that a Korean child has a 33.3 percent chance of making an error whenever (s)he utters a negative sentence. In this article, I aim to test Hagstrom’s theory and prediction. To this aim, negative sentences have been elicited from three children and analyzed. The result is that while children make optional errors in certain types of sentences, they make consistent or no errors in other types of sentences. This suggests that Korean child negation errors are controlled by sentence types rather than probability as Hagstrom claims.

A Study of Mapping Between a Source Domain and a Target Domain in Food-Related Metaphors

이희철 ( Hee Chul Lee ),( Chonghyuck Kim ) 대한언어학회 2015 언어학 Vol.23 No.4

There are many expressions based on such food-related metaphors in Korean as HUMANS ARE FOOD, DEALING WITH HUMANS IS COOKING FOOD, HUMAN DISPOSITION IS FOOD TASTE, TYPES OF HUMAN EMOTIONS ARE WAYS OF FOOD INTAKE, HUMAN EXPERIENCES ARE FOOD TASTE, QUALITIES OF IDEAS ARE CONDITIONS OF FOOD, etc. (cf. Choi, 2014). The purpose of this paper is to show that these seemingly individual and isolated metaphors correlate highly with one another and to reach generalizations about some food-related metaphors in Korean. To this end, this research will exploit not only mapping processes between a source semantic domain and a target one, but also sub-mapping and sub-sub-mapping as in Khajeh and Abdullah (2012). The separate food-related metaphors mentioned above will be generalized, mapping the source domain of food onto the target domain of humans as a multi-dimensional structured whole.

트위터에 나타난 접두어 ‘개-’의 사용 양상

오효정 ( Oh Hyo-jung ),김종혁 ( Kim Chonghyuck ) 대한언어학회 2021 언어학 Vol.29 No.1

A few researchers have recently claimed that the prefix kay-, which literally means ‘dog’, has undergone a dramatic change over the past decade. Before the change, kaywas severely confined in terms of its syntax and semantics; it was restricted to combine with a handful of nouns, and semantically, it had the sole function of adding or boosting the negative sense of its host. Kay- is no longer used as such. It can virtually combine with a host of any category which has gradable meaning, as its semantics has acquired the function of an emphatic marker like very. A linguistic change is driven by the people who use it. As the number of people who adopt and use the new features of a linguistic item grows, the chance of its survival as a transformed linguistic entity increases. Thus, it is important to examine in a precise manner how kay- is used in order to track the course of change it has gone through in the past and to predict its survival in the future. No such effort, however, has been made so far. In this article, we show that we can obtain an extensive amount of data showing the real time usage of kay- over the past decade using techniques developed in informatics and that kay- has indeed undergone a dramatic change, as reported by other researchers. We also show, by analyzing the data extracted from tweets tweeted during the 48 hours, that kay- is much more frequently used in comtemporary Korean in the new pattern than in the old pattern, a concrete piece of evidence to back the claim that kay- is productively used.

소셜빅데이터를 활용한 신조어 ‘개-’의 원형 연구

오효정 ( Oh Hyo-jung ),김종혁 ( Kim Chonghyuck ) 대한언어학회 2021 언어학 Vol.29 No.3

Traditionally, the word kay ‘dog’ had been used as a prefix in Korean boosting the negative sense of the noun that it attaches to, as in kay-kosayng ‘worthless extreme hardship’. Around 2010, however, a morpheme, which looks exactly the same as prefix kay-, began to be used among younger generations as an adverbial expression, freely combining with various sorts of categories which have gradable meanings. This new adverbial kay has thereafter been viewed as an evolved variant of prefix kay- in the Korean literature. Recently, however, Im (2015) rejects this standard view about the origin of adverbial kay, and argues that it has nothing to do with prefix kay- as it derives from khap ‘cap(tain)’ through the intermediate form khay. In this article, we probe the origin of adverbial kay using the data we collected from Twitter. Usage patterns that emerge from our analysis of the data containing khap and khay strongly indicate, contra Im (2015), (i) that khap cannot be the origin of adverbial kay and that khay can neither be its predecessor. Rather, the usage patterns match up to the expectations held by the standard view that adverbial kay originates from prefix kay.

Chronologic trends of cancer-related lymph node research in PubMed: informetrics analysis

Hyo-Jung Oh,Dongmin Yang,Hyo-Won Oh,Jae-Gyu Jeon,Chonghyuck Kim,Jeong-Yong Ahn,Se Wung Han,Chan-Young Kim 대한외과학회 2020 Annals of Surgical Treatment and Research(ASRT) Vol.99 No.5

Purpose: Given the long history of investigation into cancer and its relevance to the lymph node (LN), it would be meaningful to plot the trends of research on cancer-related LN. Methods: Queries such as “cancer,” “lymph node,” and “cancer and lymph node” were submitted to PubMed to collect articles on cancer and LN published between 1945 and 2017. The collected articles were then extracted by an automatic web crawler and examined through informetrics and linguistic analysis. Results: The number of articles related to cancer was 2,795,476 and 127,897 articles (4.6%) were found to be relevant to LN. With regard to cancer types, breast cancer was the most studied (37%), followed by gastric cancer (17%). With regard to the subjects in which the surgeon is interested, LN metastasis (57%) was found to be the topic most discussed, followed by LN dissection (22%) and sentinel LN (17%). Publications on LN metastasis gradually increased over time from 1988 to 2017 although those on sentinel LN and LN dissection have stagnated since the early 2000s. Conclusion: Although research on cancer was abundant, only a small portion was dedicated to investigating its relevance to LN. Western countries had led the research on cancer-related LN, but Asian countries began to participate as major players, expanding their contributions. While LN metastasis, one of the major cancer-related LN topics, showed a steady increase, those involved in oncologic surgery such as LN dissection and sentinel LN did not