Lee Jung-yull. 2015. “Asymmetrical Aspects of Totally and Completely as a Freestanding Form”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 23(2). 1~35. This study examines totally and completely in discourse, elaborating on their semantic preferences and freestanding form. They have been considered as virtually interchangeable without any significant differences in the meaning of utterances. Their lexical meanings and syntactic functions seem to be identical. However, their freestanding forms in spoken discourse do not tend to be equivalent. This study explicates the correlation between their semantic preferences and freestanding usage, in which totally combines with affirmative semantic preferences, while completely collocates with unaffirmative semantic preferences. The freestanding form of totally may be related with interactive pragmatics and it functions in various pragmatic roles such as a turn initiator which is utilized to respond to a previous speaker. A wide variety of pragmatic functions of the freestanding form can involve bridging device, agreement, enthusiasm, encouraging device, satisfaction, and solidarity device in spoken English. The aim of the current study is to describe how this linguistic phenomenon occurs and to achieve a better comprehension of their nature. (162)

Utterly in Their Collocation Patterns and Stand-Alone Use. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 22(2), 91-110. This paper analyzes the maximizers absolutely and utterly in discourse, focusing especially on their collocation patterns and stand-alone use. I have elucidated the connection between their combinations in their dependent use and stand-alone use. This study connects the manners of stand-alone use of absolutely and utterly to their collocation patterns in dependent use. Absolutely strongly tends to collocate with positive lexical items, and frequently with an affirmative token, thus absolutely appears in stand-alone use, often as a response token, whereas utterly never occurs in independent use. The stand-alone form tends to be a better fit for interactive pragmatic roles, such as turn initiation, which is used to respond to a prior speaker, absolute acknowledgment, agreement, pre-closing signal, solidarity, and the floor-holding and bridging devices. The larger relevance of this study is to understand the impact of language use, and analyze these words' collocations and stand-alone use. (169)