Linguistic Analysis of a Conversation - Essay Example

? The situation on the transcription was the following: A group of Korean, including myself, had a Sam-kyeop-sal - Korean-style pork belly - party atJun-ho’s home. Choong-hoon brought his coworker, Jun-gil, to the party and introduced him to us. The following excerpt is taken from the beginning of the dinner. There are six participants in the discourse: 1) Choong-hoon (Male, 30) – Single Language school student, Part time worker at a bar. 2) Hye-mi (Female, 29) – Single BMCC student, Part time worker at a jewelry store. 3) Jung-yeon (Female, 29) – This is me. Single BMCC student. 4) Jun-ho (Male, 28) – Single City college student 5) Jun-gil (Male, 28) – Married. LaGuardia Student, part time worker at a bar, 6) Hye-jung (Female, 27) – Single Culinary school student Throughout our conversation, we spent most of the time talking about work and family, but also about language. This made sense since we were all Koreans and often had to use English. Also, work and family are two of the most important things for all of us. If we attentively listen to the transcription, Choong-hoon spoke the most. His co-worker, Jun-gil, also spoke often. The reason for such might be because Choong-hoon is the eldest among the men in the party. Although everyone made fun of Jun-gil for only speaking to Choong-hoon, he actually spoke a lot as well. Besides, he probably talks to Choong-hoon a lot since he is just a guest who does not know everybody yet. So, we all wanted to know more about him to help him relax a bit. On the other hand, Hye-jung, who is the youngest among the women at the party, spoke the least. It might have been because people often made fun of her Korean pronunciation. Since then, she kept quiet for quite a while. In addition, if we listen carefully at the transcription, then it becomes evident that there are some patterns. For instance, people were all polite to Jun-gil, who was not a member of the group before. So they asked him polite questions about his family and job. Between most of the other people, the style of the discussion was a lot more different. Conversations were often filled with jokes, for people were more familiar with each other. Even if this was the case, the polite conversation markers like oh-bba, were sometimes used. Interestingly, they often seemed to be used to making jokes, for they weren’t taken personally. Furthermore, there were some rules for how to interrupt or disagree with someone. Disagreement or interruption usually goes along with the gender of the people present. For instance when, Hye-jung did not speak clearly, another girl said something about it first. Choong-hoon then did say he thought so too, but he did not say it so straight forward as compared to the girl’s comment. Also when Jun-gil was talking about whether he was working during his wife's labor, Jun-ho, another male, is the one who interrupts him. However, there were no fixed rules for bringing up a new topic. It was just done when we had all finished talking about something, but the most notable feature was that Choong-hoon and Jung-yeon, the eldest among the men and women in the party, usually brought up the new topic. Given the aforementioned scenario, let’s take a look at the linguistic principles and concepts in the discourse. First, we’ve learned the various properties of human language in class, and one of them is cultural transmission. Languages are influenced in by their culture; hence these languages are not so easy to understand without a sufficient cultural background. In the discourse, we used the words oh-bba, hyeong and nu-na, because in Korean, unlike in English, there are different ways of saying things like “you”, depending on how people are related socially, such as the age gaps of people. There are even different verbs for extremely polite situations. In our conversation, Jung-yeon said to Jun-gil, “It’s really difficult to speak to you in an informal way, even though you are younger than me.” That’s because it was the first time Jun-gil and Jung-yeon met, so they were not closed enough to speak in an informal way. Besides, in Korea, because a married person is treated as an adult regardless of ages, Jung-yeon hesitated to speak to the married Jun-gil in an informal way. If a person who doesn’t know these cultural backgrounds, and tries to learn Korean, it will be hard to get the hand of it. Second, when we dealt with the sounds of language in class, we learned that each language has different sounds. I could find an application of this principle in the discourse. In our conversation, we talked about Jun-ho’s part time episode -- When arguing with a rude customer, Jun-ho yelled “Fuck” at the customer, however the customer didn’t understand Jun-ho’s ‘[f] pronunciation.-- It often happens to Koreans, because we don’t have an [f] sound in our language. We only have the [p] sound; hence when we learn English, [f] sound is one of the difficult sounds to get used to. Besides it, [v] and [z], [?] and [d?], [?] and [?], [t?] and [?] sounds also are not on Korean language. Third, I also could observe the rules of word formation such as the borrowing, conversion and coinage on our discourse. The meaning of borrowing is the taking over of words from other languages. One example of borrowing on the observation is the word seu-si. Jun-ho asked Jun-gil “Neo seu-si jo ah hae? (Do you like sushi?) ” In this question, Jun-ho used the word seu-si which comes from Japanese ?? (sushi) -- raw fish. Also, there are many examples of borrowing on Korean language. For example, in-teo-net comes from the English word internet, and da-seu originally comes from the English word dozen, however, the word dozen was used in Japanese as da-seu(???) and then it was accepted in Korean language. In reference to the historical relationship between Korea and Japan, there are many borrowings from Japanese to that of the Korean language. However, there recently has been a movement of correcting these words into Korean because we think that these are colonial remains. Also, I could find other rules of word formation on our conversation. One example is “dang-keun-yi-gi.” When Jun-ho asked Jun-gil if he likes sushi, Jun-gil answered “Dang-keun-yi-gi. (of course!)” Dang-keun-yi-gi originally comes the word Dang-keun (carrot), which is a noun. First, it changed from a noun, then to a verb as Dang-keun-yi-da-- ‘-yi-da’ is suffix to change the parts of speech as a verb. Second, Dang-keun-yi-da is used as an invention of a new term, which means of course or right, because its sound is similar to dang-yeon-ha-da, which originally means “of course.” The formation of this word is more complicated because there are two processes at work, conversion and coinage. According to this, I could understand that “it is possible to trace the operation of more than one process at work in the creation of a particular word (Yule p.60).” Forth, we’ve learned the language variation on syntax. Like other principles of languages, the rule of syntax is different depending on language. For example, in English, the basic structure of a sentence is in the order of subject, verb and object (S V O). However, in Korean, the basic structure of a sentence is in the order of subject, object and verb ( S O V ). It is easy to find this fact on the discourse. For instance, Hye-mi said “Na neun In-cheon ye sal ah yo. ( I live in In-cheon.)” In this sentence, na neun (I) is a subject, In-cheon ye (in In-cheon) is a object and Sal ah yo (live) is a verb. Fifth, we also dealt with semantics, such as literal meaning and figurative meaning. I point out figurative meaning throughout our discourse. When we teased and pressed Choong-hoon to make a declaration of his love towards Hye-mi, he said “I’m going to become a nun. I have to lead an ascetic life.” Literally, a nun is a woman who promises to serve God all their lives, so a nun never meets a man who is sexually initiated. In his act of saying that, he doesn’t mean that he really wanted to be a nun. Instead, by using the word a nun, he wanted to say he doesn’t like Hye-mi as a woman, so he refused her with an indirect speech act. In this case, the word a nun is used as a metaphor. In addition, one of the rules of semantics, idiom, is also found in our conversation. Jung-yeon said to Jun-gil “You are the only one who puts up your hair in a topknot.” In this sentence, there is an idiom which is “to put up someone’s hair in a topknot”. It means someone is married, and it originated in the Korean traditional marriage ritual for a man. Therefore, a person who doesn’t know Korean cannot understand its true meaning of the individual words used. Surprisingly, all these processes just occurred unconsciously even though I use them and speak the language. Therefore, upon analyzing the discourse, I totally understood the importance of linguistic competence. Read More