성별이 담화표지 사용에 미치는 영향 분석

Abstract

This study focuses on analyzing the effect of a speaker’s gender upon the use of discourse markers. The data used for the analysis is Sejong Spoken Corpus, from which a 94,214-phrase corpus has been created out of public conversations, public monologues, private conversations and private monologues. The discourse markers for this study are confined to those acquiring new semantic functions during the discourse beyond the existing meaning of the vocabulary, and selected for analysis on the basis of comparison with its basic meanings and possibility of omission in a sentence. Then, the semantic functions are classified into four types: the 'Content Binding' type that occurs during the topic development process or in the relationship between the preceding and subsequent utterances, the 'Interaction' type that occurs in the process of interactions with the other party, the 'Real-time' type that occurs in the process of producing the speaker's utterances, and the 'Speaker Attitude' type related to the speaker's attitude towards or judgement on the uttered content. To analyze the effect of gender on the use of discourse markers, it is examined whether the difference in the use of discourse markers between men and women is statistically significant. Significant findings are as follows: men use a broader variety of discourse markers than women, while women show a higher frequency of discourse markers uses than men. Men use discourse markers for Real-time functions more than women do, while women use them for the Interaction function more often than men do. For men, the most commonly-used discourse markers is 'mwo (what)', while, for women, it is 'eo (umm)'. Among the discourse markers used for Content Binding function, the most frequently used marker for men is ‘Supplementary Explanation’ and ‘Categorization’ for women. Regarding 'Reactive Utterances', which send a signal that they are listening to the speaker by using 'eum (um...), eo (umm), eung (yes), ah (aha)', etc., women show a much higher use than men. Therefore, it can be said that gender acts as a major variable in the use of discourse markers in that it leads to understand usage variances between men and women as to functions used by certain discourse markers.