비격식담화에 나타난 정도부사 ‘너무’의 ‘긍정 강조’ 양상

Abstract

Kim, Kyungsook. (2016). ‘Positive-emphasis' use of 'nemu' in Korean in Informal Discourse. The Linguistic Association of Korean Journal, 24(4), 321-342. This is a corpus-based study of ‘nemu’ (Korean for ‘too much’) in its ‘positive-emphasis’ use. Although ‘nemu’ has long been used for ‘negative-emphasis’ use, it is now increasingly used for ‘positive-emphasis’ use by many Koreans. For the study, a questionnaire was administered to see the overall use of 'nemu'. Then, use of ‘nemu’ is investigated in the written Sejong Corpus of books on liberal art subjects and the spoken Sejong Corpus of talks on the same subjects. Finally, two different research subcorpora are constructed to see if there is a use difference of ‘nemu’ along the line of formality: TV news vs TV entertainment programs. The questionnaire result shows that the collocates of ‘nemu’ in ‘positive-emphasis’ use are subjective and positive emotion terms. Second, the examination of Sejong Corpus reveals that although ‘negative-emphasis’ use represents the majority of the Corpus, the ‘positive-emphasis’ use is more closely associated with the spoken subcorpus than the written counterpart. In the research corpus, it is revealed that the informal register of entertainment program shows a considerably higher ratio of ‘positive-emphasis’ use than the formal register of TV news. These results suggest that ‘nemu’ is expanding its ‘positive-emphasis’ use through spoken register and especially through relatively young entertainers. There seems to be no significant difference between male and female speakers in this trend.