A Corpus-based Analysis of North Korean Defectors in Public Discourse: Comparison of South Korean Newspapers and Western Media
Prof. Sun-Hee Lee
Dept of East Asian Langs & Culture, Wellesley College, MA, USA
Abstract
In March 2022, the number of North Korean Defectors (NKDs) residing in South Korea reached 33,882 according to the Ministry of Unification. Despite a surge in the number of defectors over two decades, socio-economic challenges and prejudice against those who crossed the border continues to intensify. In this presentation, I provide a corpus-based analysis of public discourse regarding NKDs. The analysis examines how media function to formulate the identity of NKDs and stereotypes/prejudices through linguistic representation. Noting how power is exercised through language in social and political structure, my study presents an analysis on how the South Korean and Western news media identify, categorize, and represent NKDs and explores the dynamics of language, identity, and power in public discourse. The analysis of public discourse must be interrogated from broad realms of social, historical, and political contexts. In conjunction with the long-term research project on the comprehensive discourse analysis of NKDs, the current work focuses on four major broadsheet newspapers that have distinct political stances and investigates interactive discourse features that contribute to representations of NKDs in the South Korean community. Additionally, I examine how the same topics have been represented in the Western media including New York Times and The Guardian and The Times London. Both qualitative analysis and quantitative tools explicate how language is used to substantiate stereotypes and bias by media, resulting in a credible analysis. The outcomes are expected to reveal empirical issues and challenges not only for current South Korean society and its inclusion of NKDs but also for a reunified Korea in the future.
Bio Profile
Dr. Sun-Hee Lee is a Professor of Korean in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wellesley College in the US. She earned her doctoral degrees from the Linguistics Department at The Ohio State University and from the Korean Language and Literature Department at Yonsei University. Dr. Lee's research areas include corpus linguistics, learner corpora, and discourse analysis. She has published several books and articles on Korean grammatical constructions, corpus analysis, and learner language. Her recent research interest is in a corpus-based analysis of media, gender, and personal narratives in addition to learner corpus research.
Week 25 2022/2023
Thursday 25th May 2023
11:00-12:00pm
Microsoft Teams - request a link via email
For queries or meeting link, contact Dr. Ignatius Ezeani (i.ezeani@lancaster.ac.uk)