A morpheme-based analysis of lexical bundles in Korean
Kilim Nam, Hyunju Song, Jun Seong Choi · Lexicography · 2016
This study proposes a new methodology for morpheme-based analysis designed to identify multi-word patterns in Korean, which is a typical example of agglutinative languages. The need for a new approach in corpus linguistics, which takes language typological characteristics into consideration, is also a crucial point of this paper. In Korean, functional words like prepositions or conjunctions arerealized as bound morphemes (emi or cosa) that function as ‘minimal grammatical units’. When formulaic expressions in Korean are analyzed according to the morpheme unit, as it is the case in our study, the findings yielded show significant differences from those of previous studies. Based on this methodology, our results provide supporting evidence for the following: (1) lexical bundles are prevalent inKorean, just as in English; (2) computer-defined formulaicity might be languageuniversal; (3) finally, differences in distributions or discourse functions of morphemic bundles in various genres or registers can be language-specific. The external and internal language factors that may influence these differences are discussed.