Hadikin, Glenn

English

Name not available

Corpus, Concordance, Koreans: a Comparison of the English Spoken in Two Korean Communities 
 
English language programmes have been running in South Korea since 1883 (Shim 1999) but one 
rarely sees academic papers discussing the use and development of English in that country. Shim 
(1999) argues that a form of codified Korean English is even taught in schools and, from personal 
experience, students will often use forms that are not familiar to most British or American listeners 
such as ‘I want to lose my weight’ or ‘I will marry next year’. Previous studies have tended to focus 
on written Korean English (see, for example, Jung and Min 1999) but it is clear that one cannot 
assume results from studies of written English will hold true for spoken English. 
In this paper I will report results from what is, to my knowledge, the first PhD level study of spoken 
Korean English corpora. With a theoretical foundation based on Hoey’s Theory of Lexical Priming 
(Hoey 2005) and Wray’s model of the role of formulaic language in second-language acquisition 
(Wray 2002) I have collected two corpora of spoken Korean English: one from a Korean community 
in Liverpool, England and one from Seoul, Korea. I hypothesised that there would be measurable, 
statistically significant differences between the ways certain high frequency forms are used in each 
community due to the different priming factors affecting their spoken English. 
The results show clear differences between the two groups and also suggest that combined factors 
such as Korean primings and developing skills such as the use of vague language may be giving rise 
to new completely structures in the Liverpool community that are novel in both Korean and British 
English. In the paper I also raise corpus theoretical issues and suggest that an unorthodox 
interpretation of Sinclair’s Idiom Principle (Sinclair 1991) is more compatible with Hoey’s theory and 
the data in my study. 
 
Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical Priming: a New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge. 
Jung, K. And Min, S.J. (1999). Some Lexico-grammatical Features of Korean English newspapers. 
World Englishes 18/1:23-37. 
Shim, R.J. (1999). Codified Korean English. World Englishes 18/2:247-259.  
Sinclair, J.McH. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
 
  


Corpus, concordance, Koreans: a comparison of the English spoken in two Korean communities

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Corpus, concordance, Koreans: a comparison of the English spoken in two Korean communities

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