ON THE INCANTATORY FEATURES OF KOREAN SHAMANIC LANGUAGE

한국 무속어의 주술적 특성과 그 해석

This paper attempts to demonstrate how the linguistic and mythological features of the shamanic language make it incantatory, or ′enchanting′. Passages used in shamanic rites manifest linguistic characteristics that point to their own norms and conventions, as well as some mythological features that contribute to the undecipherablity of the shamanic language. Focusing on the estranged linguistic and mythological features, I propose that shamanic languages can be best interpreted in terms of the linguistic hierarchization, a notion that has been developed since Roman Jakobson′s poetics. The present study adopts Eisele′s framework that reinterprets Jakobsonian hierarchization into a slightly revised notion on the basis of the "degree of combinatorial freedom" and the "degree of semantic immediacy", looking into a set of paradigm examples in search of some parallel structures characterizing the shamanic language. The enchanting effect of this peculiar form of language, it is argued, is due mostly to the frequent use of lexical parallelism, which works in the reverse direction of the normal process of interpretation.