A Study on the Chinese Translation Correspondences of the Korean Discourse Marker Jom(좀) - using a contextual analysis -
연세대학교, Boyeong Kim · Journal of Linguistic Studies · 2015
The Korean word “jom" has two different meanings. It can take the form of an adverb, meaning “little" with a syntactic function, or can be used a discourse marker, with discourse functions. This study aims to categorize the discourse functions of the Korean word “jom" and to examine its Chinese translation correspondences based on the Korean-Chinese parallel corpus. The KCPC consists of Korean drama scripts and their Chinese translations, and a total of 201 sentences including the discourse marker “jom" were extracted. The results of this study show that the representative pragmatic functions of "jom" fall into the following four categories: ‘speaking politely', ’utterance highlight', ‘gaining time', and ’uutterance hesitation'. The Chinese correspondences vary according to the four functions and discourse contexts. ‘Politeness' is mostly expressed with “请(qing)", “一下(yi xia)". ’Focus' usually has “一下(yi xia)", “VV(verb replication form)", “一点(yi dian)” and “Zero(no correspondence marker)”. “有点儿(you dian)" is always used for ‘utterance mitigation'. ‘Delay' was found in only one sentence, and it has no correspondence.