• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.123-130
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• 2015

Given a recent finding showing that female speakers of South Kyungsang Korean is undergoing a sound change of the lexical pitch accent, this study tested whether the change is also reflected for male speech. This study compared F0 scaling and timing properties of accent words produced by younger female and male speakers of South Kyungsang Korean. The results indicated clear gender-related differences, showing more distinct acoustic properties across the accent words for male production compared to females. Despite the better distinction, however, younger male speakers showed peak delay where the F0 peaks are located further to the right compared to conservative speakers' production. Therefore, it might be suggested that younger male speakers' accent productions are in between conservative and innovative phonetic forms.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.53-59
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• 2017

The present study examined if individual listeners' perceptual variations were associated with their cognitive characteristics indexed by the Autistic Spectrum Quotient (AQ). This study first investigated the perception of the lexical pitch accent contrast in the Kyungsang Korean currently undergoing a sound change, and then tested if listeners' perceptual variations were correlated with their AQ scores. Eighteen Kyungsang listeners in their 20s participated in the perception experiment where they identified two contrastive accent words for auditory stimuli systematically varying F0 scaling and timing properties; the participants then completed the AQ questionnaire. In the results, the acoustic parameters reporting reduced phonetic differences across accent contrasts for younger Kyungsang generation played a reliable role in perceiving the HH word from HL, suggesting the discrepancy between the perception and the production in the context of sound change. This study also observed that individuals' perceptual variations were negatively correlated with their AQ sub scores. The present findings suggested that the sound change might appear differently between production and perception with a different time course, and deviant percepts could be explained by individuals' cognitive measure.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.29-41
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• 2007

Concepts of greater and greater complexity can be constructed by building systems of entities, by relating other entities to that system with a figure-ground relation, by embedding concepts of figure-ground in the concept of change, by embedding that in causality, and by coarsening the granularity and beginning the process over again. This process can be called the Ontological Ascent. It pervades natural language discourse, and suggests that to do lexical semantics properly, we must carefully axiomatize abstract theories of systems of entities, the figure-ground relation, change, causality, and granularity. In this paper, I outline what these theories should look like.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2002.02a
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• pp.195-204
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• 2002

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the lexical-semantic structure of morphologically derived passive verbs in Korean based on Pustejovsky (1995)'s Generative Lexicon Theory (GL) and to explain the change of the root verb's lexical-semantic structure by means of passivization. Passivization in this paper is defined as the unaccusaztivization. In Argument Structure of derived passive verbs, the agent argument is deleted and the theme argument is realized as a syntactic subject. As for Event Structure, derived passives express left-headed event (achievement), whereas their roots denote right-headed event (accomplishment). In Qualia Structure, passive verbs and root ones have the same Fomal Role, but in Agentive Role of passive verbs, an act weakens to a process. Both Formal and Agentive Roles have the same theme argument.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.23-29
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• 2016

The present study tested if individual speakers showing great sound change in segments (i.e., vowels and fricatives) also had innovative changing patterns in suprasegmental properties (i.e., lexical pitch accents) in Kyungsang Korean. The acoustic analysis at a group level first confirmed the presence of group level differences in distinguishing /ɨ-ʌ/ and /s-s'/ both of which had different phonemic distinction from Seoul Korean. Younger speakers had more innovative segmental change than older speakers, and even within the younger generation, female speakers produced more innovative phonetic variants than male speakers. Regarding the individual observation within the younger group, the younger speakers with large acoustic distinction in vowels and fricatives also showed acoustically less distinct accent patterns, indicating the innovative sound change pattern consistent across segment and suprasegmental properties. The group and individual observations suggested that linguistic innovators introduced new phonetic variants with consistent degree of changing pattern between segment and suprasegmental properties.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.31
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• pp.287-308
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• 2013

Russian language tends to be quite open to borrowing. In Russian it has been for a long time the conventional way of expanding the lexicon, accepting many words from adjacent languages, including Church Slavic. In the contemporary Russian English has been the main source for loanwords. There are several linguistic factors for lexical borrowing: 1. the necessity of denominating new facts, phenomena or concepts, 2. the necessity of differentiating concepts, 3. the necessity of specializing new concepts, 4. the introduction of new international terms, 5. the increase of periphrastic expressions, 6. the needs for the more elegant and modern words. These factors have caused borrowing to enlarge the component of the lexicon and phrasal expressions, but excessive use of foreign words has brought about negative effects such as linguistic pollution. Some borrowed words are assimilated without serious conflicts, but other words undergo semantic changes in confrontation to existing words of similar meanings. These types of semantic changes comprise total change of meaning, reduction of semantic scale and extension of meaning. Semantic changes are caused by linguistic factors such as lexical conflict with existing words or by socio-culural factors such as misunderstanding of foreign words. And extension of meaning shows two types: qualitative extension and quantitative extension. The first means extending the semantic scope of a borrowed word and the latter - increasing the number of its sememe. In contemporary Russian language we can witness two productive phenomena: qualitative extension by socio-cultural factors, in which words with negative nuances are changed into those with positive ones and professional terms become common words, losing their professional meanings. On the other hand, by quantative extension some loanwords change their concrete meanings into abstract ones. In such cases loanwords acquire the additional meanings of abstractness, putting aside their original concrete meanings as the basic. On the contrary, the qualitative extension of adding the special meaning to general words or giving the concrete meaning to abstract words is not productive. And it is rarely witnessed that words of positive nuances are negatively used. It is considered that such cases are partly restricted in the spoken language or the jargon. Such phenomena may happen by the incomplete understanding of English words.

• Language and Information
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.41-69
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• 2002

This paper addresses the issue of constraints on the conversion of the participle II in German, proposing a constraint-based lexical semantic approach. I argue against the widely accepted syntactic view which is based on the dichotomous distinction of intransitive verbs, which has been advanced by the Unaccusative Hypothesis [Perlmutter (1978)]. Several arguments are also given against the semantic view which is based on some aspectual notions such as 'telicity', 'transformativity' or 'terminativity'. The crucial constraints on the conversion of the participle II in German, it is argued, is instead two lexical semantic entailments, movement with a definite change of location and affectedness. These and other lexical semantic entailments in the sense of Dowty (1991) are encoded into the multiple inheritance type hierarchy of qfpsoa. The proposal made in this paper is based on the multiple inheritance hierarchy which is envisaged in a recent framework of head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.31-68
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• 2006

The present research investigates the acquisition of the English locative alternation by Korean EFL learners, which poses a learnability paradox, taking Pinker's framework of learnability theory as its basis. It addresses two questions (1) how lexical knowledge is represented initially and at different levels of interlanguage development and (2) what kinds of difficulty Korean learners find in the acquisition of English locative verbs and their constructions. Three groups of learners at different proficiency levels with a control group of English native speakers are examined by two instruments: elicited production task and grammaticality judgment task. According to different levels of proficiency, the learners exhibit gradual sensitivity to a change-of-state meaning and obtain complete perception of the meanings of locative verbs (manner-of-motion and change-of-state) and their constructions. Overgeneralization errors are observed in their performance. The errors are due to misinterpretations of particular lexical items in conjunction with the universal linking rules. More fundamental cause of difficulty is accounted for by partial use of learning mechanisms, caused by insufficient L2 input.

• Korean Linguistics
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• v.77
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• pp.95-124
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to examine aspects and causes of the change and disappearance in the Gangneung dialect vocabulary about costume. A typical example of linguistic factors that influence the change of costume vocabulary is competition with the standard language. However, costume as culture has a more powerful effect than linguistic factor. For example, the following factors lead to the disappearance: the disappearance of the referent, the inherent characteristics of the costume, the introduction of the new culture, and the change in values about costume.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2012

This study investigated the lexical access processing of inflected Korean verbs in the mental lexicon. In Korean, verbs can be classified into two main types of inflections, which are regular and irregular inflections, which can be further divided into three types of regular inflections and two types of irregular inflections. A masked priming lexical decision task was used and the priming effects were compared. Experiments were carried out using the five different types of verbal inflections in Korean: (1) No change-regularity (regular verbs with no orthographical or phonological changes), (2) Phonological change-regularity (regular verbs with phonological changes to the stem only), (3) Orthographical change-regularity (regular verbs that only undergo orthographical changes), (4) Stem change-irregularity (the stem is omitted or alternated with the other phoneme of the stem in irregular verbs), (5) Ending change-irregularity (irregular verbs with changes in the endings by phoneme substitution). The first three types are regarded as regular verbal inflections whereas the latter two types are regarded as irregular verbal inflections. The infinitive forms of the verb were presented as target words and three different conditions were presented as prime words. The three conditions included regular verbal inflection, irregular verbal inflection, and a control condition in which morphologically and semantically unrelated primes were presented. In addition, different stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) were manipulated (43ms, 72ms, 230ms) to examine the time frame of the morphological decomposition process in word recognition. The results revealed that there were significant priming effects in all three SOAs across conditions. Hence, there was no significant differences in priming effects between regular and irregular verbal inflection conditions. This may suggest that Korean verb processing does not adopt different processing routes for regular and irregular inflections, which can also be an indication of earlier morphological information processing for Korean verbs.