Wang Hahn-sok. 2015. “A Reflective Confession on my Scholarship: Its Origins, Characteristics, and Achievements”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 23(3). 3~32. This paper builds on the special lecture that I gave at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the Sociolinguistic Society of Korea. The overall paper takes a kind of narrative form with reflective confession. Specifically, it consists of (1) scholarly genealogy of my study, (2) main characteristics of my study, (3) major achievements of my study, and (4) my special relationships with the Sociolinguistics Society of Korea.

This paper discusses theoretical orientations in the ethnography of communication and the future direction of research in the ethnography of communication in Korea. It consists of the following three parts: (1) an introduction to the ethnography of communication in Korea; (2) some discussion of theoretical orientations in the ethnography of communication; (3) future research topics in the ethnography of communication of Korean speech communities. Although it is a partial review, this paper is intended to contribute to the studies of Korean speech communities using the theoretical model of the ethnography of communication.

This paper presents a sociolinguistic description and analysis of baby talk as practiced by Korean caregivers, focusing on a special lexical set that has been traditionally associated with caregiver-child interaction. The first part of the paper describes the repertoire of baby words, which includes a total of 55 lexical items, and examines their primary meaning and general modes of usage. The second part of the paper analyzes the structural characteristics of Korean baby talk in terms of its semantic, morphological, and phonological features. The analysis is geared to the task of identifying a range of characteristics of Korean baby talk within the framework of tentatively posited cross-cultural universals. The third part of the paper describes some significant usage aspects of Korean baby talk, particularly in the context of child development and the language socialization process. Here a reference is made to the folk model of child development and language acquisition, which is explicated from the emic point of view in Korea, and some aspects of the secondary use of baby talk in Korea are briefly described.