Yang, Younghee. 2014. A Proposal of a Resolution Method on the Confusion of Word Spacing in the Current Korean Orthography. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(3). The purpose of this study is to examine the way to minimize the confusions regarding spacing address and reference forms such as ‘씨’, ‘님’, ‘양’, ‘군’ and ‘가’ among Korean language speakers. This paper explains that the reason for this confusion starts from the fact that Korean language speakers usually interpret the principals for spacing arbitrarily. As another reason for the confusion for spacing address and reference forms, this study examines perceptional changes among Korean language speakers. ‘님’, for example, was attached only to kinship terms at first. It’s usage, however, has been expanded by combining with common nouns or terms for relationships and positions and by being attached to family names or given names such. Through this procedure, the native speakers of Korean language seem like not only perceive the term as an honorific term but also consider it as a term which constructs its own meaning. In this study, they are classified as bound nouns based on intuition of native speakers, independence rate, existence of practice before those words. Through this procedure, this paper tries to arrange the words as a united grammatical unit, and hence to minimize the confusion.

• 양영희(전남대) | Yang, Younghee