A, an and the environments in Spoken Korean English

Abstract

This paper contains an analysis of small corpora of spoken Korean English – a burgeoning New English that is rarely discussed in published articles. With a theoretical framework based on Hoey's (2005) Theory of Lexical Priming, the lexical environment surrounding the items a, an and the in two Korean corpora (one comprising Korean English speakers in Liverpool, England, and the other, speakers in Seoul, Korea) are compared with two British comparator corpora. The results show a balance of differences and similarities between the Korean corpora, and this may suggest that, while Korean English is distinct from British varieties, recent priming effects and the L1 are interacting in complex ways that give each corpus a unique identity.

The Spoken BNC2014

“…Yet as time has passed, the corpus has been used for purposes for which it is becoming increasingly less suitable. For example, a recent study by Hadikin (2014), which investigates the behaviour of articles in spoken Korean English, uses the Spoken BNC1994 as a reference corpus of present-day English. Appropriately, Hadikin (2014) gives the following warning:…”

“…With notably older recordings [than the Korean corpora he compiled] […] one has to be cautious about any language structures that may have changed, or may be changing, in the period since then. (Hadikin 2014: 7) In this respect, Hadikin's (2014) work typifies a range of recent research which, in the absence of a suitable alternative, uses the Spoken BNC1994 as a sample of present-day English. The dated nature of the Spoken BNC1994 is demonstrated by the presence in the corpus of references to public figures, technology, and television shows that were contemporary in the early 1990s; see Examples (1) to (3):…”

“…This is the first publicly-accessible corpus of its kind since the spoken component of the original British National Corpus, completed in 1994, which, despite its age, is still used as a proxy for present-day English in research today (e.g. Hadikin 2014, Rühlemann & Gries 2015. The new corpus contains data from the years 2012 to 2016.…”