Development of Sensibility Vocabulary Classification System for Sensibility Evaluation of Visitors According to Forest Environment

Generally human sensibility is expressed in a certain language. To discover the sensibility of visitors in relation to the forest environment, it is first necessary to determine their exact meanings. Furthermore, it is necessary to sort these terms according to their meanings based on an appropriate classification system. This study attempted to develop a classification system for forest sensibility vocabulary by extracting Korean words used by forest visitors to express their sensibilities in relation to the forest environment, and established the structure of the system to classify the accumulated vocabulary. For this purpose, we extracted forest sensibility words based on literature review of experiences reported in the past as well as interviews of forest visitors, and categorized the words by meanings using the Standard Korean Language Dictionary maintained by the National Institute of the Korean Language. Next, the classification system for these words was established with reference to the classification system for vocabulary in the Korean language examined in previous studies of Korean language and literature. As a result, 137 forest sensibility words were collected using a documentary survey, and we categorized these words into four types: emotion, sense, evaluation, and existence. Categorizing the collected forest sensibility words based on this Korean language classification system resulted in the extraction of 40 representative sensibility words. This experiment enabled us to determine from where our sensibilities that find expressions in the forest are derived, that is, from sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch, along with various other aspects of how our human sensibilities are expressed such as whether the subject of a word is person-centered or object-centered. We believe that the results of this study can serve as foundational data about forest sensibility.