Reformulation Markers in Spanish and Korean: An Intercultural Rhetorical Study

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of Spanish and Korean reformulation markers against the backdrop of a contrastive / intercultural rhetorical approach (Kaplan, 1966; Hinds, 1987; Clyne, 1994; Connor, 2008, 2011). In order to carry out the analysis, following a line of previous research papers in Murillo (2007, 2012, 2016), an empirical study using Spanish and Korean journalistic corpus was performed. The results obtained demonstrate a disparity between the use of Spanish and Korean RMs when approached from a linguistic-intercultural rhetoric perspective, more concretely, some discourse processes, such as ‘identification’, ‘specification’, ‘definition’, ‘denomination’, and ‘conclusion’, the use of double reformulation, the repetition of the Korean markers (jeuk… jeuk… / got… got…), certain rhetorical patterns of the Korean marker got, which denote its cultural idiosyncrasy, and the use of sajaseongeo, the idiomatic expressions originated from the Chinese language, utilizing the selected markers in the two languages.