The basics of Korean

This chapter briefly introduces some characteristics of the Korean language and its writing system and gives an overview of the chapters treated in this volume on Korean psycholinguistics.

Korean has the eleventh largest group of speakers in the world, approximately 73 million. Its dialects are mutually intelligible except for the Jeju (Cheyjwu) Island dialect, which retains old forms but is becoming endangered.

Korean has an SOV (subject-object-verb) head-final feature like Japanese and unlike Chinese or English. Sentence types such as declarative, interrogative, imperative and promissive are distinguished by means of markers that appear at the end. Nominals take case markers or postpositions after them and verb stems take tense, modal, speech level, and S-type markers linearly in that order after them agglutinatively. It is similar to Japanese in this respect. Honorification is a pragmatically motivated syntactic agreement phenomenon to show the speaker's respect for the subject. Speech levels mark the speaker's various attitudes toward the hearer including (non-)politeness. Honorification in Korean is a little more grammatical than in Japanese. The three East-Asian languages are topic-prominent, with object deletion via topicality unlike pro-drop languages such as Romance languages, although Korean and Japanese have subject or nominative markers as well as topic markers, unlike Chinese. Korean and Japanese have SOV in both matrix and embedded Ss unlike German. Korean and Japanese have a null argument in a relative clause, which is coreferential with the head noun on the right hand side of the clause.

The purpose of writing is to represent speech. In writing, a unit of print represents a unit of the speech stream. Writing systems differ, however, in how they define ‘unit of the speech stream’ for the purpose of writing. In a logography such as Chinese, the unit of speech represented by a character is the morpheme. A syllabary, such as the Kana scripts of Japanese, represents each syllable with a single character. A large majority of the world's languages today use an alphabetic system, in which each character (or combination of characters) represents a single phoneme.

Alphabetic systems also vary in the consistency of the mapping between print and sound. In ‘shallow’ orthographies (such as Spanish, Italian, or, in the present case, Korean), there is close correspondence between written characters and the phonemes they represent. In a ‘deep’ orthography such as English, this correspondence is compromised. For example, the letter c may be pronounced either as /k/, as in cat, or /s/, as in circle. A number of studies have examined the degree to which a reader's knowledge of the sound system affects the processing of printed words. Because of the many inconsistencies found in English in the relation between spelling and pronunciation, it is perhaps not surprising that it has been the focus of so much of the research in this area.

Much of this research has investigated issues concerned with word regularity.

This is the third and last volume of the three-companion-volume series on East Asian psycholinguistics. East Asian here includes Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the languages that have received increasing interest in psycholinguistic research beyond the Indo-European languages. The three languages reveal extremely interesting typological characteristics; Japanese and Korean are strikingly similar in structure and various other respects, although they show surprisingly important and subtle differences. Chinese, on the other hand, contrasts more sharply with Japanese and Korean in typological patterns, although the three share certain areal commonalities such as the use of numeral classifiers. Korean and Japanese are similar grammatically, but not lexically and phonologically. Because of many commonalities in grammar, the two languages are often compared and contrasted linguistically and psycholinguistically (see Japanese/Korean Linguistics 1 to 15, CSLI, among others). Korean is generally hypothesized to belong to the Altaic language family, which encompasses Manchu-Tungusic, Mongolian, and Turkic languages. Japanese is also often believed to be an Altaic language, whereas Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Korean and Japanese are thus distinct from Chinese genetically and typologically. However, the two languages have a vast amount of culturally borrowed Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese lexical items, respectively, even adopting Chinese characters minimally in Korean and vastly in Japanese in their writing systems.

Therefore, the idea of the trio in companion volumes is crucial for comparative studies, not only among the three but also between the three and other languages including English.