Korean color naming and Korean-English language contact: A study in linguistic variation and semantic change.

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of language contact, particularly contact with English, on the Korean language. One chapter reviews the historical and sociocultural background of the three major influences on modern Korean--Chinese, Japanese, and English. Another chapter discusses the patterns of English lexical borrowing and semantic changes that occur during the borrowing process, both in the English words and related Korean words in the same semantic fields. A third chapter describes some other uses of English in Korea, including advertising, product naming, and current slang. Finally, a substantial part of the dissertation is devoted to a study of the influence of contact with English on the Korean semantic field of color. Data were elicited from forty-four consultants in two age groups (18-24 and 47-85) using Munsell color samples as stimulus materials in a three-part interview procedure based on the work of MacLaury (1986, 1992) that asked consultants to: (1) name 330 different loose color chips to determine their individual vocabulary of color terms; (2) choose a focus for each term from an array of the same color chips; and (3) map the range of each term on the array. It was found that consultants varied greatly in the number of color categories they used, with age, sex, level of education, and attitude toward the topic as possible influences. A number of English color terms were used by consultants of both sexes and in both age groups, and it is suggested that two of these, orange and pink, have possibly become the most basic terms for naming their categories for some of the consultants. It is also suggested that these two terms, as well as contact with English in general, are partly responsible for certain semantic changes in related Korean words. Another specific finding was that Korean seems to have color categories in addition to Berlin and Kay's (1969) eleven basic categories, including LIGHT BLUE, DARK BLUE, and YELLOW-GREEN, which is similar to the situation that Stanlaw (1987) found in Japanese.