earticle

영어

This study investigated the alternate use of English by Korean speakers of English in informal Korean written texts to see (1) in what situations and for what purposes Korean adult speakers of English living in the United States, code-switch into English, in the context of their own personal writing in Korean, and (2) what are the linguistic or structural features of the alternate language forms that they might produce. For this study, data were collected from 4 Korean female adults living in a mid-sized southern city with different goals for residency in the United States. Personal documents and unstructured interview were employed as a data collection method. The results showed that the structural features of the written code-switching might be explained by the typological difference between Korean and English with respect to the head position in given phrases, in that the head position ‘head-initial’ or ‘head-final’ has been considered to be a crucial factor determining the basic word order of a given language. On the other hand, it was found that the participants' perceived reason for using English content words in the Korean informal texts or adopting English word order might be for bridging the gap between their native language and their American life. It was suggested that the functional feature of the alternate use of English and Korean might be followed from that fact that memos on the datebooks should be efficient and economical, i.e. easily recognized and quickly produced.