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Article published In:
Korean Linguistics
Vol. 20:1 (2024) ► pp.1–32

The semantic extension of Korean ideophones in newspapers headlines

Focusing on printed newspapers from 1990 to 2000

 | Jilin International Studies University
This paper explores the semantic features of Korean ideophones in newspaper headlines. This paper argues that (i) there is a strong relationship between the language-specific sound symbolic meanings – dark and light vowel polarity and the meanings of ideophones in newspaper headlines and event descriptions; (ii) ideophones are much more common in articles about the financial issues; (iii) ideophones which exhibit vowel alternation go through different semantic extension routes to those of other ideophones. The findings of the paper suggest that Korean ideophones have been lexically highly conventionalized and integrated into the language system.
Keywords: newspapers, semantic extension, metaphor, ideophones, sound symbolic meanings, pragmatic function
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Korean ideophonic vowel polarity system
  • 3.Previous studies
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Vowel polarity and the meanings of ideophones
    • 5.2The frequency of ideophones in different topics
    • 5.3The influence of vowel polarity on patterns of semantic extension
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Metaphor use in newspaper headlines
    • 6.2Financial reporting and ideophones
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • The abbreviations and symbols used in this paper are as follows:
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/kl.00006.par
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