A Study on the Spoken-Language Features of Interrogative Utterances for Teaching Spoken Korean

Abstract

This study examines how the spoken-language features of Korean interrogative utterances differ between public and private registers. Nine spoken-grammar elements were coded in 1,099 interrogative utterances drawn from two National Institute of Korean Language corpora: public dialogue (radio broadcasts, counseling, and multi-party broadcast talk) and private dialogue (two-party everyday conversation). The per-utterance realization rate of morphological and lexical elements was 66.4% in public dialogue, against only 39.1% found in private dialogue. The functional distribution of interrogatives diverged as well: questioning accounted for 78.3% of private interrogatives but only 48.6% of public ones, with interaction-managing functions accounting for the remainder. This pattern is attributed to the third-party audience presupposed in broadcast and counseling talk, which makes such discourse strongly listener-oriented. The findings indicate that the spoken-language features to be reflected in teaching materials can only be specified after determining which register’s usage serves as the reference.