Grounded in Vygotskian sociocultural theory (SCT), this study examines Korean as a foreign language (KFL) students’ emerging conceptual development of honorifics through their participation in ...concept-based language instruction (C-BLI). Seven participants were recruited from a second-semester elementary Korean class at a U.S. college, and various data were collected to trace the students’ unfolding development-in-activity of three interrelated subconcepts of Korean honorifics; namely, power, distance, and formality. Qualitative findings suggest that, overall, students gained a deeper conceptual understanding and sociopragmatic awareness of using Korean honorifics through the development of these interrelated subconcepts and their participation in the goal-directed activities of C-BLI. In particular, the qualitative findings reveal that students’ prior rules-of-thumb-based conceptualizations of honorifics transformed into more semantic, systematic, coherent, and complete understandings as students are in the process of becoming more self-regulated in planning and monitoring their mental and physical activity and their linguistic choices. This study points to the crucial importance of not only the quality of materials design but also how intentional and explicit instruction can be applied to second language teaching–learning processes.
This paper aims to demonstrate the close connection between society and politeness styles by analyzing Korean language textbooks for foreign learners published by Seoul National University Language ...Education Institute from 2000 to 2019. Changes in these textbooks indicate a dynamic interplay between society and language. The study reveals notable shifts in politeness styles, particularly the near-complete replacement of the formal hasipsioche with the polite informal style haeyoche. This paper seeks to connect the observed changes in textbooks and shifts in Korean culture and society. The paper offers a brief introduction to Korean history, society, and culture, highlighting their relevance to the Korean language in general and specifically to Korean in a second language education.
The Korean language contains a complexly intricate system of self- and other- reference marking that serves to designate multiple aspects of socio-cultural symmetry and asymmetry involving speakers, ...addressees, hearers, overhearers, and referents. In this article, we use a database of TV workplace-based contexts and analyze the intricately creative ways in which interactants position themselves vis à vis their interlocutors, with fine-grained, incrementally gauged bits of gap-creating and gap-effacing discourse, through the use or non-use of honorific markings We demonstrate, through an appeal to Positioning Theory and Indexicality that these fine-grained linguistic indicators of emergent multiplicities of self-and other-construction serve as metaphorical scalar points on the sociometer of interpersonal interaction. We uncover discursive tension within these interactional contexts whereby informal interpersonal relationships leak into the more formal workplace background. Having used data based on a workplace environment, we find elements of language choice that index the intrinsic institutional hierarchy, in addition to discursive features that index other aspects of the relationships, such as prior acquaintance, as well as varying degrees of intimacy, expertise, sarcasm, coercion, and so forth.
•An appeal to Positioning Theory and Indexicality reveals that fine-grained linguistic indicators of emergent multiplicities of self- and other-construction serve as metaphorical scalar points on the sociometer of interpersonal interaction.•TV workplace-based contexts create a backdrop for the intricately creative ways in which interactants position themselves vis à vis their interlocutors, with fine-grained, incrementally gauged bits of gap-creating and gap-effacing discourse.•Discursive tension within the workplace context emerges in discourse revealing ways in which informal interpersonal relationships leak into the more formal workplace background.
Neural machine translation (NMT) is one of the text generation tasks which has achieved significant improvement with the rise of deep neural networks. However, language-specific problems such as ...handling the translation of honorifics received little attention. In this paper, we propose a context-aware NMT to promote translation improvements of Korean honorifics. By exploiting the information such as the relationship between speakers from the surrounding sentences, our proposed model effectively manages the use of honorific expressions. Specifically, we utilize a novel encoder architecture that can represent the contextual information of the given input sentences. Furthermore, a context-aware post-editing (CAPE) technique is adopted to refine a set of inconsistent sentence-level honorific translations. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, honorific-labeled test data is required. Thus, we also design a heuristic that labels Korean sentences to distinguish between honorific and non-honorific styles. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms sentence-level NMT baselines both in overall translation quality and honorific translations.
In spite of the increasing Korean population, there is still a paucity of studies examining emergent Korean bilingual children's dual-language development within their social contexts. In particular, ...no existing study has paid attention to the honorific system of Korean, which is one of the most important features in learning the Korean language. In order to address the research gap, this qualitative case study explores how four-year-old, Korean-English bilingual children utilize Korean and English and Korean honorifics depending on social contexts. With a sociocultural theoretical framework, data were collected for seven months by observations, interviews, children's artifacts, and audio- recordings, and analyzed based on thematic and sociolinguistic analysis. The results suggest that dual-language learning for early bilingual learners is a dynamic social and cultural process, involving multilayered decision-making. The findings of this study will be beneficial not only for early bilingual educators but also for the broader community of educators who are interested in the social nature of learning.
The purpose of this paper is to explain the new use of the honorific prefinal ending ‘-si-’ observed in modern Korean, called ‘respect for the nonhuman object’ or ‘respect for the situation subject,’ ...from the perspective of language change. Using specific examples used by Korean speakers in various areas, I looked at the fact that the new use of ‘-si-’ goes beyond a simple expansion of existing usage and shows the beginning of a change in function. The ‘-si-’ used to respect the topic of double subject constructions is now also used to respect the vocative phrase, which refers to an outside hearer independent of the meaning of the sentence. I interpreted it as one of the changes in the syntactic function of ‘-si-’. If the function of ‘-si-’ that respect the hearer outside of the sentence may be maintained, the ‘-si-’ may change into a form completely used for the hearers like the object-respecting morpheme did.
An experiment investigated adult language learners' ability to develop fully integrated cognitive representations of a difficult second language (L2) morphosyntactic feature: the Korean honorific ...verbal affix (u)si Native speaker (NS) and nonnative speaker (NNS) latencies during a word-by-word self-paced reading comprehension task were measured. Wilcoxon signed ranks tests indicated that NSs exhibited sensitivity to grammaticality within contexts in which the honorific verbal affix (u)si was present; they did not display such sensitivity in more ambiguous contexts in which the verbal honorific marking was absent. At the second and third positions following the critical point at which the grammaticality of the sentence was evident, NS reaction times for the ungrammatical conditions were significantly longer and the effect sizes were large, z = -4.94, p < .001, r = -0.87; z = -3.89, p < .001, r = -0.67. An item analysis yielded similar results. NNSs, on the other hand, did not demonstrate sensitivity to grammaticality at any of the word positions in participant or item analyses. The experiment suggests that even advanced learners who clearly demonstrate explicit knowledge of the Korean affix (u)si lack integrated morphosyntactic knowledge.
Expression with honorifics is an important way of dressing up the language and showing politeness in Korean. For machine translation, generating honorifics is indispensable on the formal occasion ...when the target language is Korean. However, current Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models ignore generation of honorifics, which causes the limitation of the MT application on business occasion. In order to address the problem, this paper presents two strategies to improve Korean honorific generation ratio: 1) we introduce honorific fusion training (HFT) loss under the minimum risk training framework to guide the model to generate honorifics; 2) we introduce a data labeling (DL) method which tags the training corpus with distinctive labels without any modification to the model structure. Our experimental results show that the proposed two strategies can significantly improve the honorific generation ratio by 34.35% and 45.59%.
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