Chapter 5 describes the four chief domains of linguistic politeness in Korean: speech style, honorifics, terms of address, and gendered language. Based on characteristics of those four areas, the chapter proposes different variables governing when and how to use different components of polite language, in addition to two exceptional subcases of honorifics. The term “politeness” is used in this chapter in a broad sense to denote any linguistic expression that shows respect. Honorifics are a major component of linguistic politeness in this sense, but far from the only one.

Korean has emerged as an important world language both for an expanding constituency of learners and teachers of Korean as a foreign/second language, as well as for scholars and students of general and Korean linguistics. Thousands of heritage schools, elementary, intermediate and high schools, colleges and universities, private institutes and government agencies around the world offer Korean language instruction at a range of levels. The number of institutions offering Korean and, consequently, the number of students learning Korean is constantly on the increase in Australia, Europe, China, Japan, New Zealand, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. An ever-growing number of general and Korean linguists, linguistics students, and language educators are interested in the structure and use of Korean and its universal and typological features from diachronic, synchronic, and dynamic perspectives.

Chapter 14 examines several sets of person-denoting nominals that show interesting patterns in terms of how they participate in compounding and how they take arguments and modifiers in the syntax. Using a few key exemplar nominals such as ‘writer’, ‘author’, and ‘passenger’, the chapter argues that the different structures in which the nominals appear relate to whether the denotation of a given use of the nominal is fundamentally dispositional, relating to a long-term property, or fundamentally episodic, relating to a particular event or situation. It illustrates several morphological and syntactic differences which it then accounts for in terms of these semantic properties. The last part of the chapter examines NP-internal syntax and develops an account for structures involving modifiers which are marked with genitive case, and those which lack genitive marking.

Chapter 8 examines the typologically rare three-way laryngeal contrast found in Korean. As also noted in Chapter 2, the manner contrasts in the Korean obstruent inventory have been the point of departure for many descriptive and theoretical contributions to the typology of laryngeal contrasts and related issues, such as feature theory. More recently, a diachronic change characterized by the redistribution of cue weights from the consonantal to the vocalic portion of the signal, mirroring the common historical process of tonogenesis, has sparked renewed interest in the Korean laryngeal contrasts. The opportunity to observe such a change in vivo, and to compare its progression across different dialects, provides an ideal testing ground for theories of sound change. This chapter provides a review of the literature on the phonetic and phonological characterizations of the stop-laryngeal contrast, as well as a survey of dialectal and diachronic variation in its phonetic realization. The chapter closes with an apparent-time study documenting dialectal variation and change in the use of three acoustic cues to the contrast (VOT, f0, and H1-H2) in three dialects of Korean.

Chapter 11 shows how linguistic experience plays a vital role in the perception and production of L2 speech sounds. The study presented in this chapter examines the differences between advanced English-speaking heritage language (HL) and non-heritage language (non-HL) learners of Korean by looking at their cross-linguistic categorization patterns and their degree of accuracy in identifying Korean stops. As predicted, based on the SLM, HL learners’ performance was more similar to the Korean native speakers than was non-HL learners’ performance. The results suggest that early exposure to the HL does indeed give an advantage to HL learners over their advanced non-HL counterparts, and that longer exposure to the target language for non-HL learners has a positive but limited role in obtaining a native-like perception of the three-way contrasts in Korean stops.

Chapter 26 aims to rationalize and discuss how a genre-based approach is best applied as a guiding principle for different levels of the Korean language curricula. The chapter showcases the application of the genre-based approach to intermediate level language teaching using a story genre, that is, folktales. After presenting the theoretical basis for the genre-based approach in foreign language education, the chapter highlights the empirically attested benefits of applying this framework. It then discusses issues pertaining to developing such courses – practical issues to consider, activities and tasks to be used in classroom instructions with examples, assessing learning outcomes, and so on. The proposal made in this chapter is an attempt to expand the horizon beyond what most previous research on this topic has achieved and to maximize the benefits of the genre-based curriculum in a lower level course with the popular genre of folktales.