ENGLISH LOANWORDS IN KOREAN: PATTERNS OF BORROWING AND SEMANTIC CHANGE

Abstract

During much of this century, the United States and other Western countries have had a tremendous impact on Korea. I One very noticeable effect is the changes that have taken place in the Korean language (Lee, 1989)--particularly the adoption of thousands of foreign (mostly English) loanwords. This paper begins by giving a brief history of lexical borrowing in Korean, and then specifically discusses the types and patterns of English borrowing. Finally, the principles of semantic field theory (Kittay, 1987; Lehrer, 1974; Lehrer & Kittay, 1992) are applied to attempt to describe and categorize some of the types of semantic changes that occur--in both the English and Korean words--when English lexical items are borrowed into Korean.