The pattern of use by gender and age of the discourse markers ‘a’, ‘eo’, and ‘eum’

Abstract

This paper quantitatively calculated the speech frequency of the discourse markers ‘a’, ‘eo’, and ‘eum’ and the speech duration of these discourse markers using the Seoul Corpus, a spontaneous speech corpus. The sound durations were confirmed with Praat, the Seoul Corpus was analyzed with Emeditor, and the results were presented by statistical analysis with R. Based on the corpus analysis, the study investigated whether a particular factor is preferred by speakers of particular categories. The most prominent feature of the corpus is that the sound durations of female speakers were longer than those of men when using the 'eum' discourse marker in a final position. In age-related variables, teenagers uttered ‘a’ more than ‘eo’ in an initial position when compared to people in their 40s. This study is significant because it has quantitatively analyzed the discourse markers ‘a’, ‘eo’, and ‘eum’ by gender and age. In order to continue the discussion, more precise research should be conducted considering the context. In addition, similarities can be found in "e" and "ma" in Japanese(Watanabe & Ishi, 2000) and ‘uh’, ‘um’ in English(Gries, 2013). afterwards, a study to identify commonalities and differences can be predicted by using the cross-linguistic analysis of the discourse.