Non-standard orthography, word-formation and morphophonological processes used by Japanese and Korean young people in text-based CMC
Abstrakt
The study investigated some of the characteristics of informal text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) of young people by focusing on the non-standard orthography, word-formation, and morphophonological processes typically employed by Japanese and Korean young people on social networking sites, blogs, and Internet forums. As young people share a wide range of communicative needs, the CMC of young Japanese and Koreans have a number of common features.
On the one hand, due to the morphosyntactic similarity between Japanese and Korean, such word-formation processes as non-standard compounding, clipping, creation of alphabetisms, multiple reduplication, and affixation by morphemes borrowed from English can be found in both languages. On the other hand, owing to the differences in phonology and writing systems, different means are often employed in order to serve comparable functions.
For instance, while Japanese young people frequently use gemination and glottal stop insertion in order to make the meaning of certain words more intense, young Koreans tend to use consonant intensification, aspiration or syllable-final consonant insertion instead. The research was based on two corpora consisting of Japanese and Korean CMC texts, respectively.
The phenomena observed in one of the corpora were subsequently sought in the other one and the established similarities and differences were analysed and explained. A combination of methods pertaining to contrastive linguistics and corpus linguistics was applied.