• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.405-428
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• 1990

Language has a social function to communicate information. Linguists have gradually paid their attention to the function of language since the nineteen sixties, especially to the relationship of form, meaning and the function. The relationship could be more clearly grasped through disciyrse-based analysis than through sentence-based analysis. Many researches were centered on the discourse functional notion of topic. In the early 1970's the subject was defined as the grammatiocalized topic the topic as a discrete single constituent of the clause. In the late 1970's several lingusts including Givon suggerted that the topic was not an atomic, disctete entity, and that the clause could have more than one topic. The purpose of the present study is, following Givon, to study grammatical coding devices of topic and to measure the relative topic continuity/discontinuity of participant argu, ents in Korean narratives. By so doing, I would like to shed some light on effective ways of communicating information. The grammatical coding devices analyzed are the following eight structures: zero-anaphora, personal pronous, demonstrative pronouns, names, noun phrases following demonstratives, noun phrases following possessives, definite noun phrases and indefinite referentials. The narrative studied for the count was taken from the KoreanCIA chief's Testiomny:Revolution and Idol by Hyung Wook Kim. It was chosen because it was assumed that Kim's purpose in the novel was to tell a true story, which would not distort the natural use of language for literary effect. The measures taken in the analysis wre those of 'lookback', 'persistence', ambiguity'. The first of these, 'lookback', is a measure of the size of gap between the previous occurrence of a referent and its current occurence in the clause. The meausure of persistence, which is a measure of the speaker's topocal intent, reflects the topic's importance in the discourse. The third measure is a measure of ambiguity. This is necessary for assessing the disruptive effects that other topics within five previous clauses may have on topic identification. The more other topics are present within five previous clauses, the more difficult is the task of correct identification of a topic. The results of the present study show that the humanness of entities is the most powerful factior in topic continutiy in narrative discourse. The semantic roles of human arguments in narrative discourse tend to be agents or experiences. Since agents and experiences have high topicality in discourse, human entities clearly become clausal or discoursal topics. The results also show that the grammatical devices signal varying degrees of topic continuity discontinuity in continuous discourse. The more continuous a topic argument is, the less it is coded. For example, personal pronouns have the most continutiy and indefinite referentials have the least continutiy. The study strongly shows that topic continuity discontinutiy is controlled not only by grammatical devices available in the language but by socio-cultural factors and writer's intentions.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.84 no.1
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• pp.10-21
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• 1995

This study was conducted to compare the changes in the forest resources and the process of establishment and characteristics of the Forest Law in five Northeast Asian Countries, who share the Chinese culture as a common background. The effect of Forest Law on forest resources of each countries is also compared. This study shows that the forest management scheme and the modernistic forest law in the five Northeast Countries were influenced by Japan around the early 20th century. The Forest Laws of the five countries were reestablished after the end of World War II, and now the five countries have their own Forest Law. At present, the five countries are depending on the import of foreign timber for timber supply because of the shortage of domestic timber resources. The Forest Laws of the five countries have a lot of similarities reflecting same cultural background, whereas there are differences originated from social and economic discrepancies. Currently R.O.K. is worst in forest resources compared to the other countries. The Forest Law of R.O.K. has too many articles, which has little direct relationship with forest resources management. Therefore it is recommended to consolidate the law system in the field of forest and forestry in R.O.K. including the amendment of Forest Law directing to sustainable forest and maintaining the efficiency of forest resources management.