Paik, Kyungsook. 2016. “‘About the Author’ Texts as Promotional Genre in Korean Books”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 24(3). 191~222. This article is a genre analysis of ‘About the Author’ texts (ATAs) in Korean books. Without any previous investigation, the present study first argues that ATAs duly comprise an independent genre with a promotional communicative purpose shared by Korean discourse community. Then, to answer the question, ‘Why are the ATAs are written the way they are?’, this study identifies ‘moves’ and their ‘strategies’ as well as some stylistic features of those texts. The analysis of 158 ATAs from contemporary Korean books shows that the ATAs are composed with 4 moves; an obligatory ‘Establishing Credentials’ and 3 other optional moves, ‘Giving Personal Information’, ‘Promoting the Book’, and ‘Offering Contacts’, which are realized with different strategies respectively. It also reveals that the move structures of the texts vary but a couple of patterns explain the great majority of all the texts and that the distribution of the strategies within each move also varies across genres of the books. All these moves and strategies are found to serve the purpose of the ATAs; Establishing credentials of the author by presenting the author’s relevant selves. Finally, overall subject deletion, enumeration and frequently occurring adjective clauses were also identified as the distinctive stylistic features.

• 백경숙(한양여자대학교) | Paik, Kyungsook