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.

• Ki-tae Kim(Keimyung University)