Ko, Eon-Suk. 2015. 정도부사 ‘너무’의 의미와 의미운율: 음성 말뭉치 분석을 바탕으로. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology 21.2. 223-243.

The Korean degree adverb nemu has traditionally been thought to have a negative meaning, and prescriptive grammar has dictated that it should be used in a negative context. Speakers, however, have violated this rule so often that the National Institute of the Korean Language recently acknowledged the use of nemu in a positive context. This paper investigates the usage of nemu in the conversational speech corpus Call Friend Korean. Specifically, it analyzes the distribution of the semantic contexts in which it is used. The classification of the sentiments for which nemu is used reveals that while nemu is used in a negative context most often, its usage in positive and neutral contexts is also quite frequent. A collocation analysis of the same corpus shows that nemu is more often used with negative words than positive or neutral ones. Based on these results, this paper proposes that nemu lacks a negative meaning in itself, but is imbued with a negative aura of meaning by its contexts or collocates. It also argues that the frequent violation of prescriptive grammar with regard to the usage of nemu reflects its status in the lexicon of lacking a grammaticalized negative meaning. Keywords: semantic prosody, speech corpus, degree adverb, sentiment.

Keywords: semantic prosody, speech corpus, degree adverb, sentiment