Lee, En Hye, & Lee, Chee Hye. (2024). “Phonological Aspects of American and British Englishes Embedded in Korean English: A Perspective of Linguistic Realities”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 32(1), 43-74. This paper explores the rationale behind the shift from Quirk’s deficit linguistics to Kachru’s liberation linguistics in English widely used in Korea. Despite the Korean government’s efforts to enhance communicative competence aligned with Inner Circle-oriented American Standard English, the study questions the perception of Korean English being solely dominated by American English from sociolinguistic perspectives. To delve into both psychological and empirical perspectives on English in Korea, a questionnaire survey involving 100 Korean college students is employed. The focus is on assessing the extent of influence from both American English and British English on Korean English. Additionally, the study examines how linguistic realities, disregarding sociolinguistic or functional aspects, contribute to the current state of Korean English. The analysis of survey data reveals that Korean linguistics, especially phonology, plays a role in shaping the dynamics of Korean English, supporting Kachru’s liberation linguistics. This contributes to the shift from the stage of aspiring to be more native-like American English to the stage of World Englishes, establishing itself as a variant of English in its own right.

Jang, In Chull & Yang, In Young. 2018. “Linguistic Representations of Korean Immigrant English in North American Media Space: An Analysis of Appa's English in Kim's Convenience”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(2), 1~36. With the increasing importance of the mass media in social life and the linguistic changes it incurs, sociolinguistic research on linguistic representations in cinematic discourse has been increasing recently. Situated within this growing body of emerging scholarship in sociolinguistics, this study examines how Korean immigrant English is represented in a Canadian TV sitcom, Kim’s Convenience. Drawing on the perspective that linguistic performances in fictional discourse serve as resources for sociolinguistic styling and characterization, this paper investigates how the linguistic representations of Korean immigrant English contribute to authenticating the character of a middle-aged male Korean immigrant called Appa in the TV series. For this purpose, Appa's English used throughout the TV series' first season (13 episodes) was analyzed at the phonological, syntactic, lexical, thematic, and semiotic levels. The analysis revealed that each linguistic level shows distinct but concerted efforts regarding the authentication of Appa as a Korean immigrant. The phonological features of his English effectively share those of Korean English, whereas the syntactic representations are characteristic of a simple register. The lexical, thematic, and semiotic representations additionally reinforce Appa's “Koreanness” through the sitcom's integration of topics and images related to Korean culture.

Yu, Kyong-Ae. 2017. “Perceptions and Functions of Korean Mianhada: Comparison with American English Sorry”. The Sociolingusitc Journal of Korea 25(2), 197~224. Sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic conventions for apology vary from culture to culture. While the illocutionary purpose of apologizing in English is “the speaker's sense of social obligation” (Wierzbicka 1987: 215~217) and Japanese sumimasen involves “social-self with a social alter” (Ide 1998: 524), this study argues that Korean mianhada is an apology from the speaker's moral perspective linked with collective-self. Employing Wierzbicka's (1987) Natural Semantic Metalanguage, this study discusses that sorry is a separate concept but mianhada is a nebulous concept mixed with other emotions, e.g., thank and love. In addition, presenting the examples from corpus-based dictionaries, COCA, and the Sejong 21st Century Corpus, this study discusses that sorry is authentically used as indirect and ritualistic apologies while mianhada is used as direct, indirect, ritualistic and substantive apologies. Finally, distinguishing main functions of mianhada into a sincere apology, a pseudo-apology, gratitude, a request initiator, a preclosing signal, and a territory invasion signal to strangers, this study provides cultural and ethnographical explanations.

Lee, Jung-yull. 2017. “Pragmatic Functions of Amplifiers as Response Devices in Spoken American English: A Corpus-Based Analysis”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 25(2), 103~130. The verbal behaviors of amplifiers such as very much, really, pretty, particularly, very, absolutely, totally, quite are frequently represented in descriptions of interactions between speaker and hearer. The input of the main speakers was principally explicated with regard to semantic features, including collocational restrictions, by many linguists in the past. However, this study focuses on the output of hearers in different types of talk, especially elaborating on a wide variety of pragmatic roles of the amplifiers in spoken American English. For example, the amplifiers in hearers' speech play diverse pragmatic functions as bridging devices, by indicating surprise, repair, agreement, reinforcement, enthusiasm, encouragement, satisfaction, and rapport between interlocutors. Throughout the analysis, this study suggests that although these amplifiers do not ostensibly seem to have big meanings, they play significant roles in spoken discourse.

Traditionally the steady-state central section of the vowel length has been assumed to characterize the vowel quality. However, since Peterson and Barney (1952), this position has been challenged especially for American English monophthongal vowels. In this paper, introduced are low-ordered 12 mel-scale frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), which can characterize the shape of the oral cavity filter for monophthongal vowel production in the mel-scale domain. Four pattern recognition classification models are fitted to the measurements of spectral and cepstral parameters at multiple sections of the vowel duration along with F0, Gender and Duration for the AE vowel signals in the hVd syllable in Hillenbrand et al. (1995). It turns out that pattern recognition classifiers with the cepstral properties outperform those with spectral properties, reaching the perception level of American English listeners’.

Soonhyun Hong. 2017. Effects of Perceptual Training on the Identification of American English Monophthongal Vowels by Korean Listeners. Studies in Modern Grammar 95, 55-80. In this study, we tried to demonstrate that a forced choice vowel identification training with feedback for three weeks with naturally produced /hVd/ signals of multiple English talkers’, effectively facilitated 47 Korean listeners to learn to identify English monophthongs. The subjects were assessed before, after and two months after the training with an identification test composed of a group of vowel signals produced by multiple novel talkers. The results showed that the subjects’ identification accuracies improved sharply after training and the improvement persisted for two months. Furthermore, the response latencies at the identification test got drastically shortened at Posttest and the shortened latencies also persisted for two months. The results suggest the possibility that through three-week training, most of the training effects could be transferred from the short-term memory to the long-term memory.

After pointing out both the paucity of research on cross-cultural telephone call closings between interactants whose dominant languages differ and the lopsided attention to telephone call openings, the present study first illustrates the reciprocal duplication of the identical terminal elements between the conversationalists across the American telephone closing turns and the progressive unilaterality by one interactant, and in response, the repetition of yey ‘yes’ by the other interactant in the Korean telephone closing turns. Then, it turns to an English telephone call closing between a North-American English speaker and a proficient speaker of English whose native language is Korean and whose total length of stay in English-speaking countries is limited to between one year and two years. The data illustrate that the Korean caller’s telephone closing sequence in English resembles that of Korean more than that of North-American English in light of the absence of lexical duplication, minimal reciprocity, and the terminal silence in response to bye in English. The source of the Korean-like behaviors in the English telephone call closing is traced to the influence of the telephone call closing sequence in the speaker’s dominant language (i.e., Korean in this case). The present study identifies it as conversational transfer in order to put more weight on the sequential interdependence and reciprocity of cross-cultural telephone conversation closings without limiting the participants to second language learners. Suggestions for future studies based on the limitations of the present study are also offered along with some pedagogical implications.

This case study investigated whether an experiment group of thirty-two Korean college students well corresponded to the height of back vowel /ɔ/, the lip-rounding of /ɒ/ and /ɑ/, and the vowel merging of cot - caught as the criteria for telling British from American English. This research finds its meaning in elucidating Korean college students’ perceptual gap or misconception in discriminating British English from American English within the boundary of English vowel height and roundness, and bring to light the possible background reasons. About the vowel /ɔ/, their judgement was seriously hurt because their perception of the vowel height was negatively influenced by non-linguistic factors like the preoccupation about a particular English. On the other hand, they well adopted and used the lip-rounding difference between /ɒ/ and /ɑ/ as a criterion. However, they failed to use the vowel merging of cot and caught as another criterion because most of the Korean students had not fully familiarized themselves with the vowel merging.