ON SOME SELECTED PROBLEMS OF KOREAN ABBREVIOLOGY

Given the fact that we live in the era where the pace of life is constantly speeding up, it is no surprise that ‘the economy of language’ meaning the efficient usage of language in order to achieve the maximum effect for the minimum effort has become so important in everyday life. Using abbreviated forms of different kinds is supposed to help us to economize continuously insufficient amount of time. Their overuse, however, can hamper effective communication and bring the adverse effect from what the speaker’s intention was – namely to communicate the message clearly and unambiguously and receive a response to it in a short time. Incomprehension or misunderstanding of the message leads, in fact, to unnecessarily prolonging the conversation since it requires asking additional questions in order to explain what is unclear to the listener. Reduced forms used mainly in spoken Korean can largely be divided into lexical and grammatical ones. Lexical shortenings of different kinds such as acronyms, blends, clippings etc. although rarely and rather briefly discussed by Korean linguists and basically excluded from the debate on word-formation issues definitely deserve much more attention taking into account their extensive usage. As for grammatical abbreviations, despite its frequent occurrence, the subject is not that often taken up and discussed either. The aim of this article is to present some characteristic properties of grammatical abbreviations used mainly in spoken Korean. The reduced forms in question will be divided into three categories namely particles, endings and grammatical constructions and discussed separately. This article however focuses only on those abbreviated forms, which means leaving the subject of particle or word ellipsis beyond its scope. International Journal of Korean Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 1/2015 138


Introductory Remarks
Abbreviating of various linguistic units such as lexemes, phrases, etc. is nothing new.As Szadyko (1997: 116) and Podracki (1999: 11) explain the tendency to economize in expression is presumably as old as handwriting itself, since it was already known and frequently used in Roman and Medieval Times.Buttler (1987: 641) considers it to be one of the age-old and evolutionary tendencies of a language system.Szadyko (1997: 116, 120) not only argues that it corresponds, to some extent, with the developmental tendencies of contemporary languages but also convinces that it is one of the most productive ways of enriching the lexicon of the written form of technical language, especially the language of business.Bauer (1994: 83) notices on the example of changes in the Standard English in the 20th century the increase in the number of blends and 'abbreviations' with the decrease in the number of words derived through suffixation.Nevertheless despite its growing productiveness over the past few decades shortening of lexical material as Hamans (2008: 95-98) points out is scarcely documented and hardly discussed in modern linguistic theory, since it is considered to be an irregular and relatively rare process.He, however, notices in this phenomenon of modern languages some certain regularity.Bauer (2001) refers to those nonstandard processes of word-formation, by which he means clipping, blending and acronyming, as 'non-rule governed innovations'.Marchand (1966: 364) explains that even though the shortening of a syntactical group generally called ellipsis is old, he presumes that the phenomenon of word clipping as we understand it today, was unknown in Ancient Times and that in English it does not seem to be older than 15th c.
The subject of abbreviation in Korean is also rarely discussed in comparison to other various aspects concerning the field of wordformation.Neither 최현배 (1994) nor 시정곤 (1994), 김정은 (2000), 남기심 and 고영근 (2006), 나찬연 (2007) and others make no mention about them at all.Although some authors such as 김창섭 (1996) do mention curtailed forms but their whole description comes down to just one paragraph.The author who despite a brief description intro-duces their classification is 최규일 (2007: 32, 265).He lists them along with compounding, derivation and inflection, among four ways of forming new words through morphological process.He treats them, however, as a special form of word-formation by using the term teuksu bangbeop (Kor.특수 방법) and divides them into 4 categories -namely blending or contamination (Kor.혼성법, honseongbeop), shortening (Kor.단축법, danchukbeop), clipping (Kor.절취법, jeolchwibeop) and acronymy (Kor.두문자 약자 사용, dumunja yakja sayong), nevertheless offers no examples.He also mentions shortenings apropos the language being used in the Internet (cf.pp.232-233), which is described there as 'a place where new words are being created beyond the rules of basic rules of orthography or the grammar of the language'.이지양 (1993), as one of the few linguists investigates the question of fusion (Kor.융합, yonghap) and its forms in Korean defining the necessary conditions in order for fusion to take place.He also divides fusion into two categories on the basis of changes and refers to few features of fused forms pointing out that they have not been given much attention since they lack regularity.
On the basis of books both written and published in South Korea we can presume that the subject of abbreviation or contraction is rather a new field closely connected with constantly growing pressure of time, technological and social changes, unfortunately not always positive ones,32 which have happened within the past several years.This would explain why finding in-depth analysis of this subject is quite difficult.
Interestingly enough in books printed outside of Korea, the subject is given somewhat more attention.Those books however, as the above-mentioned ones, address only the question of lexical units.Lee and Ramsey (2011) for example refer to abbreviations in the Contemporary Korean as to vocabulary trends; Song (2005: 91) describes abbreviation as 'a minor but productive manner of word formation in Korean'.Long phrases, as he explains, are abbreviated and after a period of co-existence, abbreviated forms may take over from their source phrases.Choo and Kwak (2008: 115-6) give several examples of contractions (mainly nouns and phrases) and divide them into 4 groups, namely where the dropping of either the first or the last part of the word or phrase takes place, the group of compounds or phrases in which usually the first of each element is being omitted and the last group consists of loan words.Sohn (1999: 259-61) indicates, despite a brief description, that abbreviations are observed most extensively in SK compounds, especially in non-human proper nouns but admits that it can also occur 'quite extensively' in loan words and that the abbreviations of native words are rather sporadic.
Despite the fact that curtailed forms not only are known for a very long time but also frequently used, abbreviology as a discipline of linguistics is a relatively young field.Müldner-Nieckowski (2007: 8) uses this term in the preface to his dictionary and defines it as 'a science on language abbreviations'. 33ven though short forms on the basis of their properties can be divided into lexical and grammatical ones, if they are the subjects of discussion whatsoever, lexical abbreviations are usually the ones referred to.According to Cambrigde Online Dictionary lexical abbreviations can be divided into: (i) acronyms34 (ii) blends35 (iii) clippings36 However apart from the lexical abbreviation there is also grammatical one, which applies to grammatical units, as mentioned above.The resultant forms in Korean, as this article will attempt to show, are formed through the reduction of: (i) particles, (ii) endings and (iii) grammatical constructions.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the reduced forms used mainly in spoken Korean, which are the outcome of grammatical abbreviation.Talking about shortening of phrases or syntactical units the term contraction is the most convenient to be used.However contraction, as this article will try to show, is not the only process that takes place while abbreviating grammatical units in Korean since there is also clipping involved.

Particles 37
As far as shortening of particles is concerned it can be done either through contraction or clipping.Contraction generally takes place in two cases -namely when a particle is attached to an indeclinable word in Korean such as noun, pronoun etc., to another particle following those word classes or when it is attached to an ending of conjugated forms of verbs or adjectives.Among clipped forms of particles both back and fore clippings can be found.

An indeclinable word form with a particle
Particles in Korean can be divided according to their meaning and function into three major categoriesnamely grammatical case particles (Kor.격조사, gyeokjosa), conjunction particles (Kor.접속조사, jeopsokjosa) and auxiliary particles also known as semantic or even 'special' particles (Kor.보조사, bojosa) (cf.나찬연 2007: 154, 37 Although the term particle is used by Martin (1992), Lee et al. (2000), Sohn (2001), Song (2005), Choo et al. (2008) and others, some scholars such as Rhee (2006), Ko (2008) prefer to use the term postposition, or some as 황경수(2009) postpositional word.In this article however only the term particle will be used.
Nevertheless some Korean scholars such as 최현배 (1994: 611-13), 남기심 and 고영근 (2006: 99) as well as others distinguish only two groups -namely case and auxiliary particles, which means including the above-mentioned second group into case particles. 38owever, regardless of the differences in classification of particles in Korean, it appears that the process of abbreviation although very common applies mainly to the most frequently used ones.
As far as the case particles are concerned only particles such as the nominal case particle (Kor.주격조사, jugyeokjosa), the accusative case particle (Kor.목적격조사, mokjeokgyeokjosa), the genitive case particle (Kor.관형격조사, gwanhyeonggyeokjosa), some of the adverbial case particles (Kor.부사격조사, busagyeokjosa) are actually shortened.Examples are given below.Examples just cited show that case particle can be shortened when attached to words which end in a vowel (with the exception of ex.1-2).This means that the abbreviation is more frequent in consonant-ending words.Nevertheless, apart from morphological constraints regarding shortening of those particles there are also semantic ones involved.Since they concern mainly either nominal or demonstrative pronouns only.
The nominal case particle can be abbreviated only when attached to demonstrative pronouns igeot, geugeot and jeogeot (이것, 그것, 저것), which mean 'this/ these' (thing (s) ), 'the/ that/ those' (thing (s) ), 'that/ those (thing (s))' respectively.As the shortened forms show the reduction concerns both the last syllable of the pronoun and a particle itself.The same type of syllable restructuring applies to both the genitive case particle and the locative case particle meaning 'to/ for/ at somebody' although they are attached to 1SG and 2SG personal pronouns.
As a consequence of abbreviation, the accusative case particle -reul (-를) is reduced to -r (-ㄹ).This reduction leads to restructuring of the last syllable of the preceding word too; it however does not have any part missing.-r simply fills up the place of a consonant often referred to as batchim (받침).Among abbreviated forms with this particular particle, apart from 1SG and 2SG personal pronouns there are common nouns and indefinite pronouns as well.
Even though dangsin (당신), meaning 'you' is the 2SG pronoun, it is not abbreviated when attached to each of the above-mentioned particles.The reason could be its morphological structure -as mentioned above.
The most commonly abbreviated auxiliary particle, which is at the same time the most commonly abbreviated particle among all particles, is definitely -neun (-는).As this allomorph may suggest abbreviation of this so-called topic-contrast particle only takes place when a word ends with a vowel, as it is in the case of -reul (-를) discussed above.Here also, as a consequence of shortening the particle, it is reduced to a single phone, which is -n (ㄴ) in this case.Few examples are given below.'every now and then/ sometimes' As example (9) illustrates, this particular particle is shortened not only when attached to full morphemes such as pronouns (1-2SG and 1-2PL personal or demonstrative ones), common nouns (both animate and inanimate ones), adverbs etc., but also when attached to other particles (see ex. 10.) or endings in conjugated forms of verbs and adjectives (see section 2.2).As mentioned above, it appears that the process of abbreviation of particles although common, applies mainly to the most frequently used ones.However it may be a surprise that there are very few examples of shortened forms with nominal case particles and that conjunction particles meaning 'and, along with' etc. such as -wa/gwa, -(i) rang, -hago (-와/과, -(이) 랑, -하고) as well as a large number of so-called 'special' particles such as -do (-도) meaning 'also, too', -man (-만) meaning 'only', -kkaji (-까지) meaning 'till (some time), to (some place) ', -jocha (-조차) meaning 'even', -cheoreom (-처럼) meaning 'as/ like (somebody/ something) ' are never shortened.
The reason could be their specific meaning, which in case of shortened forms might be lost and thus lead to confusion as to the exact meaning of a phrase e.g. if -man would be shortened to -n as it is in already discussedneun.Nonetheless apart from the meaning conveyed by those auxiliary particles, their morphological structure could also play an important role here.None of the above mentioned cases, conjunction or 'special' particles have the same syllable structure as -neun (-는) or -reul (-를) doesnamely CVC in vertical orientation.
Furthermore apart from contraction of particles there are also cases of particle reduction, which can be treated as clippings, although Bauer (1983: 233-4) and others refer to clipping only in the context of word formation and not in the context of declension or conjugation.They do mention however, the change of stylistic level, which can also be observed in Korean on the basis of given examples.
Although among particle clippings there are both back clippings (see ex. 12) and fore clippings (see ex. 14), far fewer examples of fore clippings can be found.
Ex. 14.Among fore-clippings of particles there are e.g. -eseo shortened toseo and ida reduced to -da.-eseo (-에서) meaning either 'from' (a place) or 'in' (while talking about the action, which takes place in a particular place) can be clipped while being attached to both pronouns and nouns (proper names as shown in the above ex.14b).
If we treat ida (이다) as the predicative case particle (Kor.서술격조사, seosulgyeokjosa), as some Korean linguists do, we can observe that i (이-) disappears when the preceding noun or pronoun ends with a vowel.Nevertheless it takes place only while talking about the present, which means that e. g. talking about the past i will not be reduced.

A conjugated word form with a particle
Since -neun (-는)an auxiliary particle used to mark topic-contrast in the sentence is shortened while being attached to nouns and pronouns (as exemplified in the above ex.9) or another particle (as shown in the above ex.10) we can easily presume and confirm this presumption that it will also tend to be abbreviated when added to various grammatical endings.As the following examples show particle -neun can co-create grammatical endings and give them an additional meaning of emphasis or stress.However, if the speaker does not want to emphasize anything -neun is simply not used.geunyeoneun jeolmeosseul ttaen sangdanghan miinieosseoyo 'She was quite a beauty when she was young.'

Endings
Among extremely numerous short forms of endings in Korean we can discover two ways according to which they are being formed -that is, as it was in the case of particles, contraction and clipping.The first one takes place when two vowels meet -one of them comes from a verb or an adjective stem and the other o ne from an ending.The process is called vowel shortening (모음축약; moeumchugyak) in Korean.Graphically shortened vowels are pronounced as a diphthong, however, only vowels which can create a diphthong are actually shortened.It applies, as 김정숙 (2005: 495) explains, only to the three below cases -when the last vowel in a stem is -i, -u or -o (ㅣ, ㅜ, ㅗ).
Generally when a monosyllabic stem ends with one of those three vowels, the shortening is not compulsory, however when a disyllabic or longer stem ends with an i (ㅣ), in other words, the longer the stem the more frequent usage of short forms.Pida (피다) 'to bloom/ blossom', ppajida (빠지다) meaning 'fall/ get into, sink down into', juda (주다) meaning 'to give/ award/ provide' and boda (보다) meaning 'to see/ look' will serve as examples here.However, apart from the above-mentioned abbreviated forms there is also an example like -jiyo (-지요) used as a question tag, where the ending itself can take a shorter form, namely -jyo (-죠) despite morphological properties, in other words regardless of the auslaut of the preceding stem.'You (he/ they etc.) went didn't you (he/they etc.) ?' Furthermore, it is also worth mentioning the conjugation of the extremely numerous and thus extensively used, verbs and adjectives stems with ha-(하-).Words such as ilhada (일하다) 'to work', yeohaenghada (여행하다) 'to travel' etc. when followed by a vowel ending can appear either in a long or reduced form.However, two neighboring vowels (one from hastem and the other from an ending) are generally abbreviated, which mainly applies to spoken Korean, although short forms are used in an informal written language as well.VST (v/c) -느라고 → -느라 'because of/ due to V; -neurago -neura with the intention of doing V' As example ( 21) illustrates the clipped part concerns the last syllable and it does not exceed its boundary.

Grammatical Constructions
In addition to particles and endings discussed above, there are numerous grammatical constructions that are commonly abbreviated as well.Some of these forms have more than one abbreviated form -namely the longer and the shorter one.They are especially characteristic to reported or indirect speech as shown in the below example.
Apart from the above-mentioned abbreviation of attributive forms of indirect speech there are also examples where after the contraction of a constituent of the reported speech construction -namely particle -go (-고) and ha-(하-) back clipping also takes place.Here the clipped part can be either exactly one syllable long (see ex. 23) or can exceed this boundary by the reduction ofn (-ㄴ) in the penultimate syllable of the conjugated form (cf. ex.24).Reduction of sentences with indirect speech applies to all types of sentences and constructions, below however there are only few examples given.
-neunyago hamyeonseo -neunyamyeonseo -neunyamyeo 'doing something while asking if/ whether V' In some cases, as illustrated in the below (25), abbreviation and clipping enable morpheme reduction even up to 50%.Examples c) ~d) also show that grammatical and lexical abbreviation can take place at the same time.
Ex. 25. a) 그렇게 하지 말라고 하니까 → 그렇치 말라니 geureoke haji mallago hanikka geureotchi mallani 'Because (I/ they etc.) tell (you) not to do so.' b) 그렇게 하려면 → 그러려면 'if intending to do so' geureoke haryeomyeon geureoryeomyeon c) 지금 출발한다고 합니다.→ 짐 출발한답니다.jigeum chulbalhandago hamnida jim chulbalhandamnida ' (Somebody) said that (he/ she) will depart now.' uri eonnineun gachi meokjago haeyo ul eonnin gachi meokjaeyo 'Older sister suggests/ suggested eating (together).' Moreover it is no surprise that if a particular word e. g. a synsemantic noun (Kor.의존명사, uijonmyeongsa) such as geot (것) meaning 'a thing', a verb gajida (가지다) meaning 'to have, to possess, to hold' or an adjective anihada (아니하다) meaning 'to be not/ to do not', has its shortened form, its form is also abbreviated when used as a part of a grammatical construction, which can be exemplified with the below (26) ~ (28).Anta (않다) is used as an auxiliary word expressing negation.It becomes either an auxiliary verb or an auxiliary adjective, depending on a word class to which the preceding word belongs.Anta is used with an auxiliary ending -ji (-지), however when it is attached to a ha-(하-) stem it can be abbreviated, which is also worth mentioning here, since it is a fairly common thing.Although its function stays the same, the meaning however, changes into less formal one.
Here, however, this particular rule is also reflected in a written form.Most linguists investigate clipping only in the context of word formation.However this phenomenon, as this article attempted to show, can also be observed in Korean in the field of conjugation.That is why the author suggests to broaden the meaning of clipping info this field too.

Concluding Remarks
The usage of various kinds of abbreviations in the era, where collecting the data is all-pervasive, where the significance of efficient communication is constantly growing and the acceleration of the pace of everyday life is so prominent it seems that using short forms of words and phrases is inevitable despite the fact that it can also cause confusion when overused.
Since abbreviation in Korean can be applied to both lexical and grammatical material abbreviated forms consequently can also be divided into lexical and grammatical ones.Among the abbreviations of the second type, which were the subject of this article, shortening of particles, endings and grammatical constructions are found.This process, fairly common especially in spoken Korean, results not only in the quantitative changes observable through the reduction of the number of syllables but also through their restructuring.
Interestingly enough, despite wide usage this process concerns only relatively narrow group or particles and endings.It both cases, however, it can be done in two ways -namely through contraction and clipping.
Endings are abbreviated in order to avoid a string of two vowels and regardless of a word class of a stem -an adjective or a verb.Nevertheless it involves only vowels which able to form a diphthong such as: i, o and u.Apart from this so-called 'vowel shortening' abbreviation of extremely numerous in Korean ha-stems followed by a vowel ending is also noteworthy.The abovementioned curtailed forms of ha-are also very commonly used in various grammatical construction, especially those where indirect speech is involved.
As far as particles are concerned, the most frequently shortened one is an auxiliary particle -neun meaning 'the', which can be shortened when attached either to various word classes such as nouns or pronouns, to another particle or even conjugation endings.This however concerns only words, particles and endings, which end with a vowel.
Only a few of the case particles and interestingly enough none of the conjunction particles are actually shortened.Nominal, accusative, genitive and locative case particles can serve as an example here.Nevertheless the situation of the first one and the last two is considerably different since their abbreviation not only strongly depends on morphological structure of a word (as it is in the case of -neun) but also often on its semantic properties too.And so, nominal case particle is shortened when attached to demonstrative pronouns; both genitive and locative case particles when attached to 1-2SG personal pronouns with the exception of the consonant-ended dangsin.The accusative case however apart from pronouns can be abbreviated when attached to nouns as well.
The answer to the question why none of the conjunction particles and only few of the case and 'special' particles are shortened is that, it could obscure their meaning and thus the tendency to maintain the comprehensibility of the message, which could be lost if particle was shortened.This would happen if e.g. one of the auxiliary particles -man (-만) meaning 'only' would be reduced to -n as it happens with the above-mentioned particle -neun.
Among particles and endings in question there are also clipped forms.Particles can be formed through back clipping, however there are a few examples of fore clipping as well.Among endings though there are basically back clippings and they usually, as it is in the case of particles, involve one syllable only.Nevertheless there are also endings, which have more than one syllable reduced.
There are also two interesting phenomena concerning abbreviation.The first one is that the lexical abbreviation is also reflected in the grammatical one, since lexical abbreviations e.g. of a noun or a verb are used in grammatical constructions.The second one confirms the context-based usage of abbreviated formsnamely that the abbreviation even of the grammatical type produces homonyms.The short forms such as nae (내) meaning 'mine', naneun (나는) meaning 'I/me' and nada (나다) meaning 'it's me' beyond the context can also convey the meaning of 'smoke, fume, a smell' or 'an odor'; 'a column or a section in a newspaper, a rebellion' or 'an orchid' and 'come into being (existence), grow, happen, come across' respectively.
Grammatical abbreviation usually accompanies the lexical one.Nevertheless, for the sake of brevity, only certain selected issues concerning Korean abbreviology in the grammatical aspect were analyzed here.The subject of abbreviation in Korean though certainly deserves further discussion and in-depth analysis.The intention of the author is to inquire more comprehensively in the domain of abbreviation in the Korean language in the future.