Chapter 19 investigates the conceptual mappings of conventional figurative expressions, specifically idioms and collocations containing the body-part term nwun “eye(s)” in Korean. Working within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), the study explores the types of conceptual shift that give rise to extended meanings and discusses how extension mechanisms draw on shared features between source and target domains. Common Korean expressions involving the eyes involve vision, persons, time, events/processes, perception (e.g., attention, attraction, interest, judgment), mind activities (e.g., thinking, knowing, understanding), and emotions (e.g., anger, avarice, surprise). These figurative expressions are motivated by the basic experiences of eye behavior, eye appearance, and vision, as well as by our interactions with people and environments. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of the influence of embodiment in language in general and in Korean in particular.

Chapter 21 provides a unified analysis of the phenomena known as expletive negation (EN), focusing on Korean data. Contrary to the traditional term “expletive negation”, the chapter proposes that the particular type of negation in a variety of contexts has semantic content that can be analyzed on two dimensions: (i) in terms of licensing, there is a crucial semantic dependency on nonveridicality, involving, e.g., polarity items; (ii) in terms of semantico-pragmatic factors, the crucial and evaluative sense of undesirability or unlikelihood, comparable to uses of subjunctive mood in some languages. The chapter shows that expletive negation in Korean (and Japanese) occurs in typical subjunctive contexts such as polite requests, emphatic sentences, dubitatives, and also shows how the nonveridical semantics of the predicates that select EN can be represented. It proposes that these evaluative contents of EN, modifying the whole utterance, can be captured by the conventional implicature (CI) logic in the sense of Potts (2005). This has the important implication that various subspecies of EN in language are indeed part of grammar.

Chapter 30 investigates how Korean language education in the Republic of Korea (ROK) has influenced national development. The chapter argues that Korean language education in the ROK has directly and indirectly contributed to the establishment of national linguistic legitimacy. Reminding citizens of their personal and national identity, the notion of identity is associated with patriotism. Morality translates into moralism as it promotes the ethicality of individuals and the state. The chapter reviews developments such as the Hang?l writing revolution associated with King Sejong in the fifteenth century, the stylistic revolution associated the Korean language promotion movement led by Sigyeong Ju and the Chos?n Language Society, and the educational revolution in South Korea.

This chapter presents some of the complex issues relating to the teaching/ learning of (emergent) pluringual children within the context of formal education. In addition to defining key concepts, the chapter exemplifies research findings by giving voice to the learner through the inclusion of short extracts from a personal testimony in which early education experiences in relation to plurilingualism are discussed. When the language(s), cultural codes and expectations at school differ from those at home, both teachers and learners can feel destabilized. Inadequate teacher education about plurilingualism leaves a void all too easily filled with misguided and unhelpful practiced language policies, fuelled by ideologies rather than research. This chapter discusses the consequences of language (de)legitimization, focusing on the complex dynamics and interplay of language, power and relationships. It examines how schools and their staff acknowledge and build on or ignore and impede plurilingual children’s knowledge and skills development.

Chapter 25 offers a survey of Jejueo (Cheju-ŏ), with a focus on two major issues. The first is the status of Jejueo and whether it deserves to be classified as a dialect of Korean, consistent with long-standing practice. Based on a test of its intelligibility to monolingual speakers of Korean, the chapter concludes that Jejueo is in fact a distinct language and deserves to be recognized as such. This finding leads to the question of how Jejueo differs in its phonology and morphosyntax from Korean. Drawing on the extensive treatment of this subject in the authors’ book, Jejueo: The Language of Korea’s Jeju Island (University of Hawaii Press, 2019), the chapter examines the salient features of its phonological patterns, its inventory of nominal particles, and its system of verbal inflection.

Chapter 18 surveys research over the last few decades on discourse analysis in Korean linguistics. Since the 1980s, a number of Korean linguists have explored the relationship between discourse and grammar, dealing with topics such as information flow, choice of NPs in discourse, word order variability, case markers, pragmatic functions of clausal connectives and sentence-enders, grammaticalization, cohesion and coherence, and text structures. In the 1990s and 2000s, discourse analysts have explored the relationship between conversation, social action, and grammar, introducing the assumptions and methodology of conversational analysis into discourse analysis. The chapter provides a brief overview of major findings and research topics in analyses of conversational data in Korean linguistics in terms of (i) turn-taking, turn-constructional units, and turn increments, (ii) interactional functions of some clausal connectives and sentence-ending suffixes, and (iii) other interaction-based studies of topics such as repair, demonstratives, and reported speech. It also discusses discourse studies carried out from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

Chapter 17 aims to give an integrated account of how subjectivity and intersubjectivity are coded in Korean sentence endings, how such suffixes are diachronically derived from their source constructions, and what typological and socio-cultural factors motivate the emergence and proliferation of such suffixes. The chapter surveys how suffixes index the speaker or both the speaker and addressee as an integral component in their semantic structure. It then examines how such (inter)subjective inflectional suffixes have diachronically been grammaticalized from non-subjective source constructions. The chapter shows that in Korean and in other languages, subjectification tends to lead to intersubjectification and not vice versa. Finally, the chapter argues that the relatively extensive diversity of inflectional suffixes in Korean, especially intersubjective suffixes, is due to two facts: 1) typologically head-final syntax and a typical agglutinative morphology and 2) the time-honored cultural values of hierarchism and collectivism as well as recent dynamic socio-economic mobilities in Korean society and culture.

Phonological awareness refers to a speaker’s knowledge of the phonological structure of the language. The study of phonological awareness has traditionally been associated with the study of reading. As reading Chinese involves an orthography that does not directly encode phonology, the issue of phonological awareness in Chinese speakers and learners has been an intriguing issue. In this chapter, we examine this issue by synthesizing research from reading, orthography, phonology, and, most crucially, from recent studies in Chinese linguistics. In the process, we identify several strong arguments for phonological awareness for Mandarin speakers.

Current studies of semantic word formation of Chinese compounds aim to work out collocational patterns and semantic patterns. In addition to investigating the surface semantic relations among the composing morphemes of compound words, researchers adopt the methods of semantic-syntactic analyses of sentences and study the predicative relation among the composing morphemes. Rather than introducing argument structure, it might be better to make use of qualia structure to analyze the semantic structure of nominal compounds.

This chapter reviews the descriptive patterns of tone sandhi in Chinese dialects along with the experimental investigations of what generalizations native speakers make regarding these patterns, how they process them in production and perception, and how children acquire these patterns. Theoretical issues that tone sandhi sheds light on, including the role of typology in synchronic theories, feature representation, productivity and learnability, and the interface between phonology and other domains such as phonetics, processing, and morphosyntax, are also discussed briefly. The chapter focuses on the interdisciplinary nature of tone sandhi research and calls on researchers to take an open and synergistic approach among different methods to gain an comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

This chapter reviews studies on contextual tonal variation in Chinese languages, often referred to as ‘tonal coarticulation’ in the literature. We start by explaining why the term ‘contextual variation’ is preferred to ‘coarticulation’ for tones, before introducing different types of contextual variation observed in Chinese languages. The following processes are covered: assimilatory vs. dissimilatory carryover effects, anticipatory effects, microprosodic effects, and pre-planning effects. Next, three debated issues in Chinese linguistics related to contextual variation are discussed. First, are dynamic tones (e.g., rise, fall) underlyingly dynamic or made up of sequences of static tones (e.g., Low-High)? Second, are tones hosted in the rhyme or across an entire syllable? Third, does the Mandarin neutral tone have an underlying target or is it unspecified? Different views on these issues are presented with suggestions on how some of them may be tested and falsified.

In this chapter, we present a general picture of how topicalization and topicality can be defined in morphosyntactic terms. We start with an overview of the syntax and semantics of topics from the vantage point of generative syntax and formal logic. We then show that the notion of topic prominence can be defined by typological correlations through a systematic survey across languages. By applying objective tests to sort out the ‘grey areas’ or the spectrum effects of topicality, this line of research may well contribute to our pursuit of an optimal solution to the mystery of linguistic variations: Both the macro-parameter setting of analyticity and the micro-parameter setting of null topic are to be justified on empirical grounds, which, if so justified, will provide an explicit account of the inner working of topicalization, as well as its interaction with other types of syntactic mechanisms such as pro-drop and focalization.

The purpose of classifying words into parts of speech is to better represent how they combine with each other. From a structural point of view, this chapter introduces the principles of defining parts of speech in Chinese and gives the details of how they are defined. The overlapping of parts of speech is examined, with an extended discussion about how to handle the overlapping classes. Studies on the same issue but from other perspectives are briefly reviewed.

The concepts being discussed in this chapter are bound morpheme, free morpheme, root, affix, semi-affix, inflection, derivation and their application in the analysis of Chinese word-formation process. The inflectional affixes include aspectual markers, plural marker, potential infixes as well as those involved in reduplication. Two major approached are presented in this chapter about the derivation of Chinese words. The essence of the morphological derivation approach is that most word-building blocks have equal status as free root and bound roots, except for affixes. Chinese words are formed with these roots according to morphological rules and the syntactic status of a word is determined by its head. The essence of the syntactic-semantic is that the majority of Chinese words are constructed according to syntactic rules in that the relationship between morphemes in a word could be described as conjunction, modification, subject-predicate, verb-object or verb-result. A few bound morphemes are treated as affixes since their semantic content has been bleached, and they form words with morphological rules.

In this chapter, we address the issues related to sentence grammaticality and acceptability. We begin with a discussion of the relationship between the two notions, and point out that despite the differences in theoretical conceptualization, the two notions, grammaticality and acceptability, are often confluent and that grammaticality is usually measured as acceptability in linguistic research. We then discuss factors beyond syntax that may influence sentence acceptability, including processing factors and semantic/pragmatic considerations. Finally, we discuss the measurement of acceptability, via either experimental methods or corpus-based analyses. To conclude, we show in this chapter how grammaticality, a seemingly purely syntactic notion, is often materialized as acceptability, which encompasses multiple linguistic modules that go beyond syntax.

Tone in Chinese languages is distinct in two aspects: (i) the complexity in the tonal make-up and (ii) widespread sandhi. The former is often attributed to underlying complexity in tonal inventories and the latter to triggers immediately adjacent to the sandhi site. Morphosyntax, though highly relevant, is often left unarticulated in the description of tonal inventories and processes. This chapter unravels four major aspects in which morphosyntax condition tonal processes (a) the licensing and/or generation of tonal contours, (b) the neutralization of tone, (c) the triggering and blocking of sandhi; and (d) the impact on tonal prosody. While phonological patterns in other languages are sensitive to the word- and post-lexical levels divide, it is the structural constituency that is often more relevant than syntactic category in Chinese tonal processes. Lest one overstates the power of morphosyntax, note also that morphosyntactic conditioning of tonal processes is likely mediated through alignment and interface with prosody structure. Thus morphosyntax plays not a deterministic role, but a substantially contributive one in the intricacies of tonal processes in Chinese.

Despite the complexity and variation of physical signals, human perception of a speech sound uttered by different talkers or in diverse contexts is amazingly constant. Nonetheless, the neurocognitive mechanisms of this fundamental human perceptual ability are not well understood. Even less is known about the neural bases of phonetic constancy. We present an emerging picture of this important issue based on accumulating behavioral as well as neuroimaging evidence from lexical tone studies. Lexical tone offers a useful test of various existing theories proposed based on segmental studies, because of its variable and dynamic nature. We draw evidence from a series of studies on the perceptual normalization of lexical tones to shed light on prior theories. We also discuss findings from neuroimaging studies which advance our understanding of the temporal and spatial neural signature of phonetic constancy in lexical tone perception. A new model is proposed which emphasizes that listeners extract and integrate information from multiple sources in a fast and robust manner, to help them achieve phonetic constancy.