• 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.

• Korean Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.129-136
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• 1970

As an attempt to determine if the morphological differences between the southern and western oysters are due simply to the local ecological factors or are based on their fundamental genetic nature, oyster seeds produced in 1968 at Tong-Young, Ye-Chun, and Ko-Hung on the south coast and at Kan-Wol-Do on the west coast were cross-transplanted during May of 1969 to compare their growth. The spats were placed in plastic baskets which permitted free water flow through and the baskets hung from a wooden rack located at a tidal zone of less than I hour exposure at a depth chosen to keep the baskets submerged in water at all times. Twice a month the growth of the spats were measured along with the air and water temperature and salinity. The early summer spats, which were $17-240\%$ larger, in size, than the late summer spats at the time of cross-transplantation, grew more slowly than the late summer spats when exposed to identical environmental conditions, shortening the initial gap to a $5-20\%$ level as the first year of the growth phase came to an end in December. The growth of the Kan-Wol-Do spats lagged considerably behind the southern spats at all localities tested, whereas there were no significant differences among the latter groups. This suggests that the morphological differences between southern and western Pacific oysters in Korea are a manifestation of genetic variety and that Pacific oysters cultured along the south coast are of an identical variety as they are commonly believed to be. The seasonal changes in temperature and salinity even during rainy season in both the southern and western coastal areas are well within the range suitable for successful spawning, and spat fall. However, since the results were based on twice-a-month measurements with no data covering the critical period before and after spawning, they can only serve to indicate at best the general pattern of changes in the environmental conditions of each growing area.