You know Korean English? Lexical priming in short strings of Korean Spoken English

This paper introduces the emerging new variety of Korean English to what may be a relatively new audience. Shim (1999) suggested that Korean English was codified in the form of school textbooks by the end of the 1980s; now, more than 20 years later it would be reasonable to expect a number of Koreanised forms to be detectable in contemporary Korean spoken English but, to my knowledge, there has never been a corpus-driven study that explores this variety. With a theoretical backdrop based on a new theory of language, Hoey’s theory of Lexical Priming (Hoey, 2005), I explore three high frequency lexical strings, ‘do you know’, ‘but you know’ and ‘and you know’ and their variation in two corpora of Korean English and two of British English. The results suggest that Korean speakers use certain strings as extended connectives to ‘buy’ extra processing time and the study raises interesting questions about the relationship between string form and meaning.