Purpose: Diabetes is a metabolic disease that occurs when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin (Type I diabetes) or when the body does not effectively use the insulin (Type II diabetes). One of the most common complication of diabetes is diabetic retinopathy(DR). DR is a time-dependent disease and induces blindness. DR produces reactive oxygen species (ROS) and superoxide is mainly made from mitochondria electron chain and it is harmful to eyes. Methods: In this study, eyes were enucleated from glucose-immersed zebrafish which is good model to generate diabetes and then mitochondria were isolated to evaluate activities of mitochondria electron transfer complex. Activity of mitochondrial electron transfer complex in eyes was measured by UV-vis spectrometer. Results: After the glucose immersion, the amount of mitochondria in eyes was increased compared to non-glucose-immersed zebrafish. Mitochondrial complex I, II, III, and IV activities of glucose-immersed zebrafish was improved compared to non-glucose-immersed zebrafish. Conclusions: These results indicated that 3 days or 7 days glucose immersion on zebrafish to induce the early stage of diabetes on zebrafish. Zebrafish might contribute to metabolic compensatory mechanisms in eyes to restore their mitochondrial homeostasis on the early stage of diabetes.

The present study aims to investigate the effects of the intonations on the syntactic interpretation of the interrogatives with a wh-expression in the Daegu-North Gyeongsang Korean and the Seoul metropolitan Korean. To this end, it analyzes the syntactic and prosodic structures of the interrogatives with an embedded wh-clause or a yes/no-question with an indefinite pronoun. Two types of perception tests, one with unmodified intonations and the other with transplanted intonations, were carried out to analyze the respondents’ interpretations of the three types of the interrogatives. The results of the test with unmodified intonations were as follows. First, more than 90% of the respondents chose appropriate answers to the three types of the wh-interrogatives with no statistically significant differences. Second, the respondents’ reaction times demonstrated with statistically significant differences that the processing load of wh-questions with matrix scope was heavier than that of wh questions with narrow scope or yes-no questions with an indefinite pronoun. Third, embedding verbs of the question-selecting predicate class such as gunggeumhada ‘wonder’ led to longer reaction time than those of the proposition-selecting predicate class such as saenggakada ‘think’. In addition, the results of the perception test with transplanted prosodies revealed two decisive factors. First, the interrogative-endings -ka/na were more influential factors in the respondents’ syntactic interpretations of wh-questions than the other endings such as –ko/no or the prosodies were. Second, wh-questions with such embedding verbs as saenggakada ‘think’ were interpreted in close accordance with the transplanted prosodic structures, but not so much so in the case of wh-questions with such embedding verbs as gunggeumhada ‘wonder’ irrespective of the prosody transplants.

The present study investigated the patients’ lexicons in unfolding migrant worker-domestic doctor interactions at a free-of-charge medical center for migrants (Center B) against those at a large general hospital (Hospital A) and those at another small free-of-charge hospital (Hospital C). In so doing, the focus was on the patients’ lexicons at Center B against those at the other institutions. Overall, the data at Center B consisted of approximately 80 consultations that the researcher himself participant-observed and audiorecorded at the three institutions over a span of two years. A qualitative investigation of the patients’ lexicons at Center B demonstrated that the patients who visited Center B initiated far more advanced scientific terminologies. Also, they adopted more nominalized forms, The lexical content and form appeared to result from the fact that the migrant patients were advanced degree seekers in agriculture, engineering, and science. Thus, the patients’ lexicons at Center B illustrated that the finding of the previous studies which argued that the patients at free-of-charge clinics were mostly unskilled laborers were oversimplistic and even stereotyping. The present study proposes a more critical applied linguistic study of migrant patient-domestic doctor consultations.

Concentrating on the non-musculoskeletal patients and revising the overall outlines of the phases recognizable in biomedical discourse, the present study investigated the linguistic phase markers that characterized the initial and the follow-up phases and the mini-phases in them, which added up to the characteristic major phases in Korean Oriental Medical discourse (KOMD). Focusing on the centripetal force of the patient’s constitution on KOMD, it proposed distinguishing an initial session from a follow-up session due to the weight on the former for identification of the patient’s constitution. Within the first session, the present study illustrated that the doctor adopted the non-proximal temporal expressions to mark the phase boundaries in an effort to identify the constitution. Such phase markers included habitual or iterative frequency expressions, distal temporal adverbials, experiential constructions without ‘recently’ or ‘nowadays,’ and the habitual present. Subsequently, the study turned to a follow-up session and demonstrated that the doctor adopted proximal temporal expressions in order to demarcate the phase boundaries. Such phase markers included proximal temporal expressions, the temporal adverbials that highlighted the difference between the pre- and post-treatment, and explicit comparatives and equatives. Consequently, the phase models revised for KOMD were in operation, structuring both the major phases and the mini phases in them around the patient’s biophysical, psychosocial, and reactional traits. That said, as Mishler’s (1984) study demonstrated, it worked as long as the interaction was doctor-centered. When the patient’s role in the phases was brought into light, however, the model would invite further revisions.

Morphosyntactic and prosodic information is accessed by native speakers of North Gyeongsang Korean when interrogatives are interpreted. The present study investigates the interface between these structures. To do so, the study analyzes the syntactic and prosodic structures of the dialect’s yes/no and wh-questions, and then examines the rate of comprehension and acceptance of the two types of the interrogatives in a perception test. The prosodic structures in the test are modified by transplantation, the results of which allow us to find out the following. First, presented with the interrogatives whose syntactic and prosodic structures did not match, the native subjects of Gyeongsang Korean relied more on the prosodic structures than on the syntactic ones. Second, changes in prosodic structures had a strong influence on simple sentences, but relatively less so on complex sentences. These results lead to the conclusion that prosodic structures are the decisive factor in syntactic interpretations, and, accordingly, are intricately intertwined with the syntactic structures during the processing of interrogatives.

The pre-collegiate ESL tutor program at a small satellite campus of a large state university in the USA changed its orientation from a conversation partner program to the recitation program. In so doing, it required both the tutors and the (mostly Asian) tutees to submit weekly reports along with short reflections to each course instructor and to the ESL program coordinator The current action research study qualitatively explored the tutee reflections and investigated their discursive characterization of the tutoring sessions and/or the tutors in an attempt to examine if the change in the program direction was perceivably implemented duing the transition. The data for the study consisted of more than 210 weekly tutee reports for five intermediate and high-intermediate ESL courses that the program offered in spring 2009. The findings illustrated that the reflections generally constructed the peer-tutoring sessions as an academic event, but not so much as an intercultural encounter. In addition, the reflections also constructed the most appreciated qualities of the tutors as kindness in personalty and clarity in academic explanations, but many were lacking substantive details of their praises. The overall findings suggested that the change in the program direction was being implemented as intended albeit at some expense of intercultural awareness. Simultaneously, the findings also pointed to the need of clearer instructions for the academic orientation of the program, intercultural awareness, and more substantive reflections. Finally, the ethnographic background and the findings demonstrated that the pre-collegiate ESL tutor program had its own challenges that were identifiably distinct from those in a tutor program at college writing centers or in EFL peer-tutor programs in an EFL context.

Ki-tae Kim. 2017. A Sociolinguistic Study of the Diachronic Changes of the Names of Korean Oriental Clinics: With Special Reference to –tang. Studies in Modern Grammar 96, 149-166. The current study explores the diachronic pattern of the changes in the names of Korean Oriental Medical clinics, the names of which contain the Sino-Korean -tang (堂) in the ult of the core. A total of 636 such names are identified and statistically analyzed along with their founding years through simple exponential smoothing, double exponential smoothing, and the moving average. The results show that there has been a slow, but significant decline from the late 1980’s and on. The primary motivation behind the trend is traced back to the increased sense of Korean identity in the more transnational world at the time. More specifically, the official replacement of han (漢, ‘China/Chinese’) with a homophone han (韓, ‘Korea/Korean’) in referring expressions to Korean Oriental Medicine (e.g., hanuywen ‘Korean Oriental Medical clinic’) in 1986, the subsequent 1988 Olympic Games, and the contemporary movement to use Hankul exclusively at the expense of Hanca including tang all coincided with the decline, thus, contributing to the timing of the consistent decline. Some limitations and implications are also discussed.

After pointing out both the paucity of research on cross-cultural telephone call closings between interactants whose dominant languages differ and the lopsided attention to telephone call openings, the present study first illustrates the reciprocal duplication of the identical terminal elements between the conversationalists across the American telephone closing turns and the progressive unilaterality by one interactant, and in response, the repetition of yey ‘yes’ by the other interactant in the Korean telephone closing turns. Then, it turns to an English telephone call closing between a North-American English speaker and a proficient speaker of English whose native language is Korean and whose total length of stay in English-speaking countries is limited to between one year and two years. The data illustrate that the Korean caller’s telephone closing sequence in English resembles that of Korean more than that of North-American English in light of the absence of lexical duplication, minimal reciprocity, and the terminal silence in response to bye in English. The source of the Korean-like behaviors in the English telephone call closing is traced to the influence of the telephone call closing sequence in the speaker’s dominant language (i.e., Korean in this case). The present study identifies it as conversational transfer in order to put more weight on the sequential interdependence and reciprocity of cross-cultural telephone conversation closings without limiting the participants to second language learners. Suggestions for future studies based on the limitations of the present study are also offered along with some pedagogical implications.

Korean Oriental Medicine has unequal access to some common linguistic resources that it shares with biomedicine under the dual medical system. At the societal level, the biomedical linguistic hegemonies allow biomedicine to unmark its entities, while mark Oriental ones with han- ‘Korean,’ as the prequel to the present study (Kim 2015c) illustrates. However, there has been little research that investigates the unmarking norms at the (intra-)institutional level of Oriental consultations in reference to those within the discourse of Oriental medicine itself. Noting the gap in research, the present study explores the Oriental interactions that are apparently immune to the societally imposed (un)marking norms and investigates the types, distributions, and meanings (in particular, referential specificity) of the unmarked references to Oriental entities. To do so, it qualitatively analyzes selections from a data set of 15-hour-long naturally-occurring consultations between Oriental doctors and their patients. The findings demonstrate that Oriental interactions frequently form a linguistic enclave, the intra-institutional norms within which regulate that the references to Oriental doctors, clinics, and medications be unmarked. Within the enclave, the unmarked uysas make a reference to a generic Oriental doctor or doctors, while the unmarked first-mention sensayngnim, albeit a rare example, to a specific Oriental doctor (more specifically, the chief doctor). The unmarked first-mention pyengwens, mostly disambiguated by the proximal deictic expressions, refer to the specific Oriental institutions at which the interactions are in progress. The unmarked first-mention yaks refer to specific Oriental medications, whereas the unmarked to a generic one. The apparent contradiction between the findings of the present study and those of the prequel is not surprising at all, but rather is indicative of the very “heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 1984) under the dual medical system in Korea. That is, the references to either of the medicines under the dual system can go unmarked while abiding by a respective set of the referential norms, albeit at different levels: one at the intra-institutional level and the other at the inter-institutional and societal level. Their distributions are also discussed on qualitative and ethnographic terms.

The present study investigates the speech acts (Searle 1979) of the four forms of the kkunhta exchange (i.e., kkunhnunta, kkunhulkey(yo), kkunheya(ha)keyssta, and kkunhca) in telephone conversation closings in Korean. It demonstrates that the four cannot be simply lumped together with kkunhe(yo) let alone the annyeng exchange. First, kkunhnunta in telephone conversation closings serves either as an assertive or a commissive (the latter being far more likely). Its subject restriction and sentence type prevent it from functioning as a directive. Second, kkunhulkey(yo) serves only as a commissive. Its subjection restriction and sentence type as a “promissive-assurance” define its speech act as such. It thus formes the “notice/commissive-(silent) acceptance” pair or the “inform-(silent) acknowledge” pair. Third, kunheya(ha)keyssta operates either as a commissive when the elliptical subject is the speaker or as a directive when it is the addressee, bearing some resemblance to kkunhe(yo). However, even as directives, their functions are not identical. Last, kkunhca as a terminal proposal lies between a directive and a commissive. Also, even as a directive, its subject restriction (i.e., first-person plural) differs from that of kkunhe(yo), and accordingly, the adjacency pairs that it belongs to differs from those that kkunhe(yo) does. Overall then, the present study illustrates that the four forms of the kkunhta exchange are functionally distinct from the kkunhe(yo) and annyeng exchanges. Each of them performs different speech acts and belongs to different adjacency pairs.

Korean Oriental medicine has unequal access to some linguistic resources that it shares with biomedicine under the dual medical system despite their comparable legal positions. At the societal level, their asymmetric linguistic hegemonies are encapsulated in, and perpetuated by the Medical Law of Korea (e.g., Ch. 1, Article 2), which consistently marks the former with han- ‘Korean’, while unmarking the latter. However, there has been little empirical research that examines the unmarking norms in unfolding discourse. Noting the paucity, the present study investigates whether or not the societal marking norms persist at a situational level, particularly in unfolding Oriental medical interactions, and if so, in what forms. To do so, it qualitatively analyzes a data set of 15-hour-long naturally-occurring consultations between Oriental doctors and their patients. It evidences the consistency of the unmarking norms at the situational level and demonstrates that the first-mention references point to biomedical entities even within an Oriental interaction despite the absence of any linguistic markings that favor biomedicine. Thus, potentially ambiguous unmarked first-mentions such as uysa (sensayngnim) 'doctor,' pyengwen 'hospital/clinic,' yak 'drug,' and uyhak 'medical science' are macrolinguistically disambiguated. Consequently, they discursively materialize the macrolinguistic hegemony that biomedicine holds under the dual medical authority. The very fact that such one-way intertextual references pervade even unfolding Oriental discourse with little confusion and resistance is symbolic of biomedical dominance and power asymmetry between the two medicines.

The present study investigates kkunhe(yo) in telephone conversation closings in Korean. After laying down the theoretical foundations on the canonical telephone conversation closings and the termination vs. leave-taking views that Clark and French (1981) propose, it revisits previous studies on Korean telephone conversation closings and illustrates that some group all terminal exchanges together under leave-taking in spite of their apparent contact termination view. It then advocates for the termination view of kkunhe(yo) rather than the leave-taking view in light of the fact that it provides better explanations for the focus of kkunhe(yo) on the contact termination as a speech-act pair even when the second-pair part is filled in with a silent act of a hang-up. In so doing, the study also demonstrates that the termination view adequately differentiates kkunhe(yo) from other terminal exchanges (in particular, leave-taking exchanges such as annyeng).

The Korean language demonstrates some confusion in the number distinction of the first person possessives wuli ‘our’ and nay ‘my.’ Several studies have attempted to explain the reasons, but little research has investigated the acquisition and distribution of the two pronouns among children. Thus, this paper asks three questions: first, what pattern young native speakers of Korean such as elementary schoolers demonstrate regarding the usages of the two person possessives; second, when Korean speakers acquire the variations; third, whether or not such sociolinguistic factors as gender play a role in the distribution. This study investigates the patterns in the distribution of the wuli + NP and nay + NP that are produced by 60 elementary-school subjects through an oral Discourse Completion Test (supplemented with pictures). The data demonstrate that even the children make the wuli-nay distinction consistently, predominantly opting for the “canonical” forms. This study, therefore, empirically demonstrates that the number distinction between wuli and nay is prescriptive at best. However, the data do not present a clear pattern of age or gender influence on the distribution.