The distribution and function change of ‘yo’ appeared in 20th century spoken language corpus

Abstract

This study aims at researching the change of ‘yo’ in terms of distribution and function through investigating the distribution and function of ‘yo’ appeared in 20 th century spoken language corpus. The data of this study are Korea University spoken language corpus and with these data we researched ‘yo’ quantitatively as well as qualitatively. As a result of the study, we identified that the use of ‘yo’ was spreaded in the latter part of 20 th century and this spread was related with the spread of ‘haeyo’ style. Also the most influential register classification criterion of ‘yo’ use variation is ‘one way or two way’ criterion and in two way registers the various uses of ‘yo’ were more appeared. In one way registers, ‘yo’ appeared productively in 1960s and in this case ‘yo’ functioned as the realization of ‘haeyo’ style and the delimit of the intonation unit. In two way registers, ‘yo’ appeared productively in the latter of 1950s and in this case ‘yo’ functioned as the anaphor of the predicative phrase. Of the two way data, the registers of the distinguishing ‘yo’ realization are the general formal two way register and the special formal two way register. Especially the special formal two way register as debate rarely used ‘yo’. This study is meaningful in the way that the distribution and the function of ‘yo’ are empirically investigated with 20 th century spoken language corpus. But as this study treats a wide range, more detailed studies are needed.