A Comparative Study Of Vacancy Words In Cognitive Category In Chinese And Korean And Analysis Of Korean Students’ Common Errors

According to Cognitive Linguistics, there are distinctive differences in cognitive categoryof all ethnic groups. This distinction reflected in a language also contributes to differences inconcept category of each language. Vocabulary as a collective unit of essence, consciousness,and reasons of a culture, the concept category of any languages does not completely coincidewith each other. We often have the same category of vocabulary is not corresponding to theone, if the Korean students fail to recognize the presence of vacancy words, it will oftenappear the error during learning Chinese.Korean comprises vast number of Chinese vocabulary in its language, but Korean andChinese are clearly two distinctive languages. Thus, the representations of a shared Chineseword do not always agree in both languages resulting in situations of varying categoryvacancy. Students often experience vacancy words in the second language acquisition process,the source of vacancy words is the nation’s history, cultural background, social life style andthe different understanding of the objective world. We know, cognitive linguistics is to revealthe language from the angle of human cognition about the objective world. Founding oncategory, we classified concept of words in cognition, if have not the ability what is let thediffer in thousands of ways of objective things and phenomena to be categorical, we can notunderstand their living environment, will not be able to processing and structure aboutexperience. Category vacancy is one of the reasons why not one by one correspondencebetween different languages. Vacancy word is formed based on the category. It must havevacancy words between the different languages. Because of Chinese characters used inKorean language, Chinese characters word ratio in Korean language is about57%, theKorean students learning Chinese is often converted to use Chinese characters, becauseKorean has a lot of vocabulary was from Chinese characters, students will naturally feel the meaning of the words is the same or corresponding, So during the Korean students studyingChinese, error ratio of using vacancy word is quite high.This category vacancy takes from in three different situations. First, the complete vacancy:some concepts exist in Chinese but the same concepts are nonexistent in Korean, and viceversa. Second, the partial vacancy: some concepts convey differences in both connotation anddenotation of Chinese and Korean languages. Third, the grammar category: the discrepancyin grammatical functions of a word in two different languages. Both the complete vacancyand the partial vacancy can fall under two further subdivisions, the formal vacancy and thesemantic vacancy. Based on Category Theory of Cognitive Linguistics, a survey wasconducted during a Chinese-Korean translation class. The research was performed to discoverthe status of the usage of vacancy words in Chinese among Korea students. The resultsshowed the relevance of reseons in the vacancy words, the effects of difficulty level ofvacancy, the complexity of cross in the vacancy words, and the accuracy of the each category.This research will bridge the cognitive differences which may develop during thetransformation processes of Korean students by accurately illustrating the similarities anddifferences of Chinese and Korean vacancy words. Also, the study will promote adequateusage of vacancy words and will further analyze the status of future inadequate usages.