This is the author’s postprint. Copyright is now held by Edinburgh University press. Final version is available at http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/cor.2014.0049.
A, an and the environments in Spoken Korean English
Glenn Hadikin
School of Languages and Area Studies
University of Portsmouth
Park Building
King Henry 1 Street
Portsmouth PO1 2DZ
This paper comprises an analysis of small corpora of spoken Korean English: a burgeoning New English that is rarely discussed in published articles. With a theoretical framework based on Hoey’s Theory of Lexical Priming (Hoey 2005) the lexical environment surrounding the items a, an and the in two Korean corpora (one comprising Korean English speakers in Liverpool, England and the other, speakers in Seoul, Korea) are compared with two British comparator corpora. The results show a balance of differences and similarities between the Korean corpora which may suggest that while Korean English is distinct from British varieties recent priming effects and the L1 are interacting in complex ways that give each corpus a unique identity.
1 Introduction
The Republic of Korea, or South Korea, is a small country situated between China and Japan and has a population of just fewer than 50 million[1]. The people speak Korean, considered to be either an isolated language or part of the Altaic group that includes Turkic and Japonic languages (Lee and Ramsey 2000), and, as Porter (2011) reports, ‘English mania’ has now become so widespread that people have even had surgery on their tongue in the hope that it will improve pronunciation. The search term “English in Korea” gets notably more hits on Google than the term “English in China” (1.6 million and 618 000 respectively[2]); English has been taught to all middle and high school students since 1945 and in all elementary schools since 1997 (Tollefson 2002) but until very recently it was rarely listed as a World English in reference books such as Crystal (2003:111). Crystal reproduces a ‘circle of World Englishes’ from McArthur (1987) that includes 51 regional varieties including Appalachian and Inuit English as well as Chinese and Japanese English but it does not mention the English used in South Korea whatsoever (in this paper the terms Korea and South Korea are both used to refer to the Korean republic). The large number of teaching positions being advertised online at the time of writing, however, is a reflection of the level of interest in English[3] and the extent to which it is used in Korea in the 21st century is a reflection of Korea’s developing multiculturalism (Mehlsen 2011 provides a useful summary) where English is used more and more outside of the classroom albeit typically in groups where at least one speaker does not speak Korean.
Korean English has more recently been discussed as part of a World Englishes model (see Kachru and Nelson 2006) and the variety will be discussed in this light throughout this paper i.e. although Korean speakers often refer to external norms it is a developing form of English in its own right and its unique features can be described and discussed without necessarily being seen as erroneous. This is in contrast to discussions of Konglish (a disparaging term used to describe a mixture of Korean and English). Korean Learner English, comprising the features described in Lee (2001), is a more positive construct that highlights certain cases where the L1 affects Korean people’s English, and is noted to still carry the implicit message that features of English unique to Korea or East Asia are problematic. . (it only refers to articles by stating that the Korean language does not have them) but note that it still carries the implicit message that features of English unique to Korea or East Asia are a problem.
Previous Korean English studies have tended to focus on pronunciation (see Yeni-Komshian, Flege and Liu 2000 for example) or ideological and pedagogical issues of teaching English such as Park’s (2009) study which claims three underlying ideologies in Korean English: necessitation is the idea that English is a necessary tool for success in a global economy, externalisation suggests that English is often still seen as the language of the other and can conflict with a Korean identity and, finally, a shared ideology of self-depreciation – that no matter what they do Koreans see themselves as poor at English (Park 2009).
A study that explicitly argues that Korea now has a form of codified English that is taught in schools is Shim (1999). Shim highlights a variety of usages that are found in Korean English textbooks ranging from lexico-semantic differences (on life used as a synonym for alive e.g. gardens come on life again) to grammatical differences such as her claim that the simple present tense is not differentiated from the progressive form; as an example Shim reports that the following exchange would be acceptable in codified Korean English:
Q What happens to the grass and trees when spring comes?
A The grass is turning green and trees are budding with fresh leaves.
(Shim 1999: 253)
Shim (1999) discusses articles twice under a heading of morpho-syntactic differences (between Korean and American English): the first is her suggestion that students are taught that a noun phrase must be preceded with the definite article when the noun phrase contains a relative clause so he is the man who can help other people (Shim’s example) must be used rather than he is a man who can help other people. Shim’s second point regarding articles is that Korean English allows for more variation in terms of count/noncount nouns and gives the example although it is a hard work, I enjoy it as an acceptable structure. For the purposes of this paper I accept Shim’s claims of codification as evidence that Korean English has begun to separate from related varieties. Note, however, that this study is now over twelve years old and there has not, to my knowledge, been a corpus-driven study published that highlights Korean English as it is actually used in the 21st century.
With this lack of corpus-driven studies in mind I collected and transcribed two corpora of Korean spoken English for my PhD. The motivation for creating two corpora was to allow me to explore similarities and differences between Korean English as spoken by volunteers in Korea itself with that of comparable Korean volunteers speaking English in the UK. The theoretical basis for this paper is Hoey’s Lexical Priming which postulates that:
As a word is acquired through encounters with it in speech and writing, it becomes cumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which it is encountered, and our knowledge of it includes the fact that it co-occurs with certain other words in certain kinds of context.
(Hoey 2005:8)
Lexical Priming repositions the related phenomena of collocation and colligation at the very heart of language so that even traditional grammar is seen as a secondary output. The following ten priming hypotheses are posited:
1. Every word is primed to occur with particular other words; these are its collocates.
2. Every word is primed to occur with particular semantic sets; these are its semantic associations.
3. Every word is primed to occur in association with particular pragmatic functions; these are its pragmatic associations.
4. Every word is primed to occur in (or avoid) certain grammatical positions, and to occur in (or avoid) certain grammatical functions; these are its colligations.
5. Co-hyponyms and synonyms differ with respect to their collocations, semantic associations and colligations.
6. When a word is polysemous, the collocations, semantic associations and colligations of one sense of the word differ from those of its other senses.
7. Every word is primed for use in one or more grammatical roles; these are its grammatical categories.
8. Every word is primed to participate in, or avoid, particular types of cohesive relation in a discourse; these are its textual collocations.
9. Every word is primed to occur in particular semantic relations in the discourse; these are its textual semantic associations.
10. Every word is primed to occur in, or avoid, certain positions within the discourse; these are its textual colligations.
Reproduced from Hoey (2012)
Hoey (2005) argues that cultures harmonise their primings in three key ways: formal education, shared literary and religious traditions and the mass media. If we are primed then by television, radio, adverts, our friends, teachers, neighbours and family members - indeed every single instance of language we are exposed to - it would be reasonable to expect measurable differences in the language used by two communities in two different countries even when they share a first language and cultural background. This study was developed to test such a hypothesis as well as to explore the level of similarity between the corpora. The following research questions have guided the study:
1 What are the key similarities between the two Korean English corpora in terms of the lexical environment around the articles a, an and the?
2 What are the key differences between the Korean corpora and two British reference corpora in terms of the lexical environment around articles?
3 To what extent can Lexical Priming theory account for any observed variation?
Hoey (2005) makes use of selected 2-grams and 3-grams (amongst others) in his own analysis. On the face of it an analysis of function words may seem surprising (not least when one notes Hoey’s claim that every word has pragmatic and semantic associations) but Hoey provides a convincing argument that in the winter has different semantic primings from in winter – in his corpus of news articles from The Guardian; , the former tends to occur with material process verbs whereas the latter tends to occur with relational process verbs which highlights the potential priming effects of the. The focus on function words is also likely to minimise variation depending on the topics discussed during data collection.
Note Hoey’s (2005) caution - shared by the author - that concordance lines cannot be taken as direct evidence that speakers are primed (psychologically) to associate certain words and strings with other words and strings; the concordance lines and corpus data are to be seen as an indication of strings that could reasonably be seen as being primed. In a similar vein I share Hoey’s rejection of lemmatisation for the purposes of this study simply because one cannot assume different forms of a lexical item will share primings; get a job for example will be treated independently from got a job unless the data provide a reason to discuss common primings. Hoey (2005) also suggests that a speaker’s L2 primings will be superimposed on their L1 primings; this is clearly a complex relationship that requires further research but it will be touched upon in this paper and partially explains the choice of articles as the focus of this paper.
Articles were chosen partially because there is no article system in the Korean language (and thus less obvious L1 interference) and, perhaps more so, because many of my students and respondents reported that it was the most challenging aspect of learning and using English. Lee (2001) only refers to articles by stating that the Korean language does not have them while Ko et al. (2012) highlight a number of problems surrounding article use in Korean English but is based on analysis of very specific tasks consisting of the volunteers responding to prompts such as draw circles around the books during written and picture-based tasks rather than speech. Chuang and Nesi (2006) use a corpus-driven method to study article use in Chinese Written English and show that up to 29.7% (including problems with the zero article) of the learners’ errors are article related. It also seems reasonable to suggest that articles would be subject to subconscious priming effects (rather than the more conscious effects of education) while speakers are focussing on the (more salient) content of their speech. I begin with a brief summary of the two Korean corpora and two British comparator corpora that were used.
2 Four corpora
The two spoken Korean English corpora were collected in Liverpool and Seoul in 2008 and are named SK (for Seoul Koreans) and LK (for Liverpool Koreans). For each recording the Korean informant and myself were situated in a small room as I began by asking questions about their reasons for studying English, hobbies and career ambition (for example); I aimed to keep the conversations as informal as possible and was keen to find a subject that would ‘get them talking’ freely without focussing on form. The following dataTable 1 shows that SK and LK were well matched for age and years of learning English but that SK has a more notable female bias that should be noted when considering the significance of the results. Ideally the number of speakers and gender balance would be better matched but difficulties finding respondents who were willing to be recorded speaking English prevented this. (Recall Park’s (2009) suggestion that Korean speakers tend to feel that they are poor at English and thus may be hesitant to volunteer for such studies.)
SK LK
Number of respondents 39 28
Average age 25 27
Gender 29f (78%) 16f (57%)
8m (22%) [4] 12m (43%)
Average years learning English 9.7 12.2
Table 1: Korean informants
The respondents in Liverpool had spent an average of two years living in the UK. My own utterances were removed from the main Korean corpora and not used in subsequent frequency counts but all audio files and complete transcripts were kept for reference. The total number of word tokens in each of the four corpora used in this study is shown in Table 2.: