Morpho-Syntactic Patterns in Spoken Korean English

Varieties of English Around the World #G62

by Sofia Rüdiger

Morpho-Syntactic Patterns in Spoken Korean English presents fundamental research on the use of English by South Korean speakers. Despite the extraordinary and vibrant status of the English language in South Korean society (demonstrated, for example, by the notion of English Fever), research on the forms of English in the South Korean context has been sadly neglected in the study of World Englishes. This monograph is the first to provide a rich and contextualized description of the Korean English morpho-syntactic repertoire. It draws on the specifically compiled Spoken Korean English (SPOKE) corpus to shed light on Korean uses of plural marking, articles, pronouns, prepositions, and verbs in spoken English, and demonstrates that English is indeed the language of those who use it. This volume will be highly relevant for researchers interested in Expanding Circle Englishes, Asian Englishes, spoken language corpora, and morpho-syntactic variation.

246 pages, Hardcover

Published July 8, 2019

About the author

Sofia Rüdiger is a postdoctoral research associate at the Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, with a research focus on World Englishes, digital communication, language and food, and pragmatics. In 2017, she completed her PhD work on English in South Korea, which was later published in John Benjamins’ Varieties of English Around the World series as the monograph Morpho-Syntactic Patterns in Spoken Korean English (2019). She is editor of the World Englishes special issue Discourse Markers and World Englishes (with Sven Leuckert, 2021) and her work on Asian varieties of English has resulted in the design and compilation of two spoken corpora: SPOKE (corpus of Spoken Korean English) and TASE (corpus of Taiwanese Spoken English; with Jakob R. E. Leimgruber). Her journal articles in the field of variational linguistics have appeared, among others, in English World-Wide, World Englishes, and English Today. In addition, she is author of The Language of Pick-Up Artists – Online Discourses of the Seduction Industry (with Daria Dayter, Routledge, 2022) and editor of Talking about Food (with Susanne Mühleisen, John Benjamins, 2020) and Corpus Approaches to Social Media (with Daria Dayter, John Benjamins, 2020).