Culture and Interdiscursivity in Korean Fricative Voice Gestures

Abstract

This paper explores the cultural significance of a type of audible gesture in Korean speech that I call the Fricative Voice Gesture (FVG). I distinguish between two forms of this gesture: the reactive FVG, which serves as a self‐standing utterance that signals personally felt intensity, and the prosodic FVG, which can be superimposed upon an utterance as a form of intensification. Based on an ethnographically informed analysis of interviews, Christian sermons, and advertisements for soju, a Korean spirit, in South Korea, I view the interdiscursive link between reactive and prosodic FVGs in terms of the ongoing cultural revalorization of the sound shape. I focus in particular on the shift from harsher to softer FVGs—and their omission altogether—according to different, but related, paradigms of social differentiation such as class, gender, and age. [voice, gesture, prosody, intensification, korean, South Korea]

The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: Navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity

“…From Sapir's (1915) now classic Abnormal Types of Speech Among the Nootka to Marshall Durbin's (1973) tentative presentation of a consideration on the phonologicalsemantic networks found in Mayan languages to Dell Hymes's (1979) "How to Talk Like a Bear in Takelma" to Anthony Woodbury's (1987) concern with "meaningful phonological processes." Other more recent works on phonetic and phonological gestures -from the indexing of social intimacy among women through pulmonic ingressives among the O'odham (Hill and Zepeda 1999) to voice registers in Mesoamerica (Sicoli 2010;Stross 2013) to the influence of ejectives and sound associations on language change in Quechua (Mannheim 1988) to fricative gestures of intensity in Korean (Harkness 2011) -speak to the role of sound and the production of sound and their ideological salience as important components of linguistic and ethnographic analysis. Returning to Navajo, Gladys Reichard's (1948) "The Significance of Aspiration in Navajo" stands as an important contribution on the social importance of sounds within Navajo words.…”

Exilic Suffering: Music, Nation, and Protestantism in Cold War South Korea

“…Notably, identification with Western and Western-style music came to be one of the terms of cultural acceptability for the growing South Korean middle class in an urbanizing context. 16 Just as important was the South Korean state's efforts to preserve traditional Korean music through the Intangible Cultural Properties system (since 1962), which contributed to the museumization of traditional music. 17 As Namhee Lee, historian of modern South Korea, suggests, the objective of the state-directed project of preservation may have never been to reassert traditional music in a living context but rather to affirm Koreans as moderns by folding certain cultural practices into a temporal space called "the past": "the official designation of folk culture as national tradition formalized and displaced the lived experience of the past as an artifact and at the same time highlighted contemporary Korea's transformation from the past."…”

Vowel harmony redux: Correct sounds, English loan words, and the sociocultural life of a phonological structure in Korean1

“…The alternation between ‘a’ and ‘ŏ’ in English loan words appears to invoke this rich Korean system of sprachgefühl (Sohn 1999: 96) that pertains to fundamental oppositions and their associated values. Absent an explicit linkage to, and thus opposition to, a Japanese origin for Korean speakers, the system of formal oppositions from another area of Korean phonology seems to have ‘leaked’ into the pronunciation and perception of loan words (see Harkness 2011 for a different example of this kind of phenomenon), contributing to the way the ‘a’/‘ŏ’ distinction is perceived not merely as a variation but as the variation – the alternation – between old and new, between tacky and modern, between provincial and cosmopolitan. We might say that the ‘a’/‘ŏ’ distinction is operating covertly as a link between two forms of linguistic differentiation, with the longstanding, more pervasive one ‘coloring’ the more recent, more restricted one.…”