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.

• Ki-tae Kim(Keimyung University)