한국어 신어 사용 추이 조사 방법론에 대한 고찰 - 2015∼2018년 국립국어원 신어 조사를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper reexamines the methodology adopted by the Korean Neologism Investigation Project to survey changes in neologisms use from 2015 to 2018, in order to assess its characteristics, discuss its issues and limitations, and suggest solutions to overcome its shortcomings. The target neologisms of this study are the neologisms investigated from 2005 to 2009. The usage trends of these neologisms are surveyed by analyzing a corpus of online news articles dating from 2004 to 2018 compiled for the purpose of this study. The results obtained are then compared with the results yielded with the methodology currently used by the project. Two types of issues arise from the current methodology. As it consists of collecting data for a given period of time in order to investigate neologism usage trends for the desired time span, when the time span needs to be extended, data is subsequently collected and added to the existing corpus. Such a corpus is heavily impacted by the high variability of Web data over time, thereby making the time of collecting data a thorny question. This paper examines to what extent the variability of the Web over time affects the results of the investigation of neologism usage trends as conducted up until now. The second issue is concerned with the restriction of the target neologisms to those investigated the previous year whenever the investigation is being extended. In order to cope with this issue, the present paper compares the results of such methodology with the results of a survey wherein the target neologisms have not been restricted as such so as to identify the most suitable methodology for the investigation of neologism usage trends.