A Contrastive Analysis of English and Korean News Headlines

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study aims to identify language-specific factors and cross-linguistic parameters that characterize linguistic variations between English and Korean news headlines. The structural patterns and linguistic variations deployed in English and Korean headlines were analyzed in the light of the three contrastive typological aspects; 1) SVO vs. SOV, 2) subject-prominent vs. topic-prominent, 3) right-branching vs. left-branching. For the research purpose, this study first identified structural patterns of 200 Korean and 200 English newspapers headlines. After that, I classified structural patterns into two categories: ‘sentence-type’ and ‘noun phrase-type,’ which were further classified into subcategories for the analysis of distributional patterns of each category. The data analysis reveals that both languages tend to maximize information presentation through the use of genre-specific grammar conventions and typological strategies: English headlines tend to rely on structural devices, while Korean headlines are heavily dependent on morphosyntactic devices. This study suggests that the contrastive structural patterns and variations between the two languages shown in the collected data might be recognized as one of the reflexes of language-specific strategies functionally associated with the typological characteristics of each language.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Typological Differences in English and Korean
• 3. Method
• 4. Findings and Discussion
• 5. Conclusion
• References