Kang, Hyeon-Seok 2009 Variability in the Use of Korean Discourse Markers 'ye' and 'ne' The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 17(2). This paper investigates the variation observed in the use of 'ye' and 'ne' in Korean, especially focusing on the suggestions of J W Kim(1985) and H S Kim(1998) that women use 'ne' in a higher frequency than men. This study is conducted on the basis of two types of data 12 relatively recently released movies and 7 TV talkshows (baegbuntoron) produced by MBC. In the preliminary analysis of this lexical sociolinguistic variable two additional variants, 'e' and 'nye', were observed (besides 'ye' and 'ne'), especially the former accounting for as many as 9 percent of the tokens Results of logistic regression analyses provide support to the genderlectal difference suggested by previous research, and also show that discourse functions of 'ye' and 'ne' and speaker-hearer age relationship can influence their usage as well. A significant idiolectal variation within two gender groups was also observed. Overall 'ye', not 'ne', was a more dominant variant of the two.
(0)
(0)