Organizer and Chair: Eun Mee Kim, University of Southern California
Jaehoon Yeon, SOAS, University of London
The causative and passive suffixes in Korean serve as a grammatical device for changing the transitivity of verbs. On the other hand, there are some verbs used either transitively or intransitively without any addition of suffixes or any alteration of the root verbs, but with the object of the transitive verb the same as the subject of the intransitive. We named this kind of verb the "neutral-verb." The intransitive construction of the neutral-verb has been called "anticausative" construction when compared with the corresponding transitive construction. The morphosyntactic and semantic criteria for neutral-verbs that we established in this paper have been shown to be useful to distinguish the various pseudo-neutral-verb constructions from true neutral-verb constructions.
The subject of the transitive form of neutral-verbs behaves like the causer of the causative construction. As a consequence, the transitive neutral-verb constructions exhibit semantic interaction with the causative constructions. On the other hand, the intransitive neutral-verb constructions, in which the patient appears as the subject, share a semantic characteristic with the passive constructions. However, there are semantic differences between these two constructions. The difference between the analytic passive and the intransitive construction of the neutral-verb lies in whether an agent is implied or not. On the other hand, the difference between the analytic causative and the transitive construction of neutral-verb depends on whether the agent (or "causer") controls the action of the patient directly or indirectly. Lastly, we have examined the cases of affix-mediated transitivity alterations. Although the way in which the transitivity alteration is realized differs from language to language, it is common cross-linguistically that a pair of morphologically related verbs participate in the alternation.
Jinim Park, University of Oregon
In the same way Black Americans’ experiences were erased in the discourses of the Vietnam War, the Korean soldiers’ experiences were not illuminated adequately either in America or in Korea. Korean soldiers were sent to the war according to the decision of a Korean military government that was in need of political and economic support from the United States. Soldiers themselves did not have any humanistic raison d’être: soldiers went to Vietnam to make money. As a consequence, it is materiality that characterizes the war experiences for Korean soldiers differently from those of American soldiers. The desires of the Korean soldiers are often portrayed in the form of PX, rations, and money orders. As much as the war demarcates a certain period in American culture epitomized with the appearance of hippies and their culture, it also colors Korean culture in the 1960s distinctively. Popular songs and fashions of the period are intimately related with the Vietnam War experience. The colonial and postcolonial situation of Vietnam often overlaps that of Korea. Suk-young Hwang and Junghyo Ahn often allude to their experiences during the Japanese colonial period of Korea and the Korean war. This sense of coloniality seldom appears in American narratives. The sense of woundedness is more painfully descriptive and deeply sympathetic in American narratives while Korean narratives are often rough and confined in that respect thanks to strong communal sense and the ideology-biased tradition in contemporary Korean writings.
Jong-Myung Kim, Korean Institute for Buddhist Studies
Contemporary scholarship has regarded syncretic Buddhism (T’ong Pulgyo) as one of the most distinctive characteristics of Korean Buddhism. Some of the eminent Korean Buddhist scholars have gained recognition for their attempts to harmonize the various disputes among differing ideas of Buddhism.
Credit for the organization of ecumenical nature is given to Wonhyo (617–686), the most creative and profound thinker in Korean history, of the Silla period. Representative monk-scholars of succeeding periods of Korea, Chinul (1158–1210) of the Koryo period, Hyujong (1520–1604) of the Choson era, and Han Yongun (1879–1944) of the Japanese colonial age, had continued these nonsectarian tendencies, thus making syncretic Buddhism a distinctive characteristic of Korean Buddhism. However, responding to the changes of their time, syncretic thinkers of Korea showed differences and similarities concerning the methods and contents of their harmonization schema which they each dealt with.
Through an in-depth examination of their representative works such as Wonhyo’s Treatise of the Adamantine Absorption Scripture (Kumgang sammaegyong non), Chinul’s Excerpts from the Dharma Collection and Special Practice Records with Personal Notes (Popchip pyorhaeng nok pongip sagi), Hyujong’s Mirror of the Three Teachings (Samga kwigam), and Han’s Treatise of Reformation of Korean Buddhism (Choson Pulgyo yusillon), this paper will: (1) discuss their philosophical ideas; (2) analyze differences and similarities in their syncretism; (3) examine their motives for harmonization; and (4) propose a new methodology for research on Korean Buddhism, by extension, on East Asian Buddhism.
Hyuk-Rae Kim, Yonsei University
Since the Korean War, Korea has experienced unprecedented economic growth and profound industrial structural changes. The industrial structure shifted from agricultural to manufacturing and the labor shifted from labor intensive to capital intensive manufacturing. The research questions addressed in this study are: how divergent structures of economic governance have become established over time in Korea and how the mechanisms of governance have been changed.
Three structural features of economic governance are: first, the configuration of economic structure in terms of average size and size distribution; second, the concentration of market structure in terms of various concentration measures of the firm and business group levels; and third, the interdependence of inter-organizational structure.
The study has found in examining the structural characteristics of the mode of economic organization in Korea over the past 40 years that the mode of economic organization has been distinctively arranged in terms of the three structural characteristics over three historical periods. During the Rhee regime period, small-scale, labor-intensive forms of economic organization predominated economic activities without an extensive network of subcontracting relationships. In the Park regime period, large-scale capital intensive forms of economic organization predominated economic activities through the aggressive forms of vertical integration and horizontal diversification. And in the Chun regime period, we can find large business groups still dominated economic activities and intensified an oligopolistic market structure. However, organizational coordination has shifted from a vertical pyramid structure to a market-oriented cooperative structure via subcontracting.
This shift in turn led to a resurgence of small and medium-scale enterprises and to an emergence of competitive market structure.
Jeff T. Keele, University of California, Berkeley
The National Committee for a Democratic Constitution (NCDC, Minju honbop jengch’wi kukmin undong ponbu) emerged to play a crucial role in the June struggle of 1987 in South Korea. This broad-based umbrella group successfully framed the goals and tactics of the social movement. Their tactics both won the sympathy of a surprisingly broad constituency and allowed even its more timid supporters to actively participate in that movement without the fear of government reprisals.
This paper reexamines the June struggle from the perspective of coordination and mobilization strategies to explain how a successful movement emerged to capitalize on the military regime’s vulnerability that summer. The paper argues that the emergence of the NCDC umbrella organization contributed importantly, and that its success depended heavily on a core of Christian activists. The solid activist background of these individuals along with the apparent absence of ulterior agendas of political power made them acceptable to the broad array of activists as coordinators for the movement. Meanwhile, their commitment to broadly acceptable goals and peaceful tactics allowed them to frame a movement that appealed to middle-class Koreans and elicited their support.
The argument draws on and extends insights from social movements literature, including the concepts of movement framing and mobilization tactics as well as ideas about resource mobilization and political opportunity structures. It contributes to our understanding of the empirical history of the Korean democratization process while exploring the usefulness of contemporary social movements theory.