Author(s): Sydney Christley
Mentor(s): Richard McBride, Julie Damron, Jeanette Drake
Institution BYU
The pattern of increasing Korean cultural influence over the last several decades is known as the “Hallyu wave” and has been a rapidly growing area of study for scholars. However, most studies focus on topics such as the globalization and diffusion of Korean culture instead of examining that diffusion from a linguistic standpoint. There is still a distinct scarcity of literature that deals with Korean-English code-switching and, specifically, K-pop song lyrics. This paper attempts to address this lack of research by providing a grammatical analysis of English-Korean code switching (CS) in K-pop song lyrics according to Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame Model as outlined in her 1997 book Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in code switching (Oxford University Press). This model argues that one language involved in code switching is more dominant; Myers-Scotton calls this the Matrix Language (ML) and the other language the Embedded Language (EL). The ML provides the morphosyntactic framework that phrases from the EL are inserted into. In order to examine this, songs containing a mixture of both English and Korean lyrics were selected from Korea’s Melon yearly top 50 charts from 2022 and 2023. Their lyrics were used to create a corpus containing around 15,000 words which provided several hundred examples of English-Korean code switching. The instances of CS were then analyzed and classified into groups based on the grammatical structure of their English and Korean constituents, such as Korean Modifier + English Noun, English Adverb + Korean Clause, and English Word + Korean Particle. The majority of examples of CS found in the corpus could be classified into a small number of categories, suggesting that CS in the genre of K-pop song lyrics generally adheres to a strict set of rules and constraints. Studying this topic provides valuable information about how the human brain stores, combines, and processes the grammatical structures of two languages.