한국어 학습자의 서사 담화 유형에 따른 전경․배경의 구분 기준과 그 양상 연구

Criteria for the Classification between Foreground and Background in Different Types of Narrative discourse of Korean Learners: Development and Application

The primary objective of this study is to find out how differently foreground and background are described in the narrative discourse of Korean learners. For the basic discussion the foreground and background cutoff were proposed by analyzing actual discourse data assisted by existing studies on foreground and background such as Gestalt psychology and discourse pragmatics, which was then applied to the Korean learners’ actual narrative discourse. The data in this study is from the narrative discourse of both an intermediate level Korean learners group and a native Korean speakers group. The narrative discourse was divided into two types: personal and impersonal. The results of the study are as follows. Both the Korean learners and the Korean native speaker groups had significantly more foreground in their impersonal narratives and more background in their personal narratives. This shows that the aspects of describing foregrounds and backgrounds depends on the type of narrative discourse in both the Korean learners group and the native Korean speakers. This result is in line with Bardovi-Harlig’s sectional study of linguistics, which claims that foreground and background follows the universality of the narrative structure, since this study found that both the Korean learners group and the native Korean speakers described foreground and background within the rules of the universality of narrative structure.