Pleonastic Phenomenon of Korean and Romanian from the Perspective of Korean Language Educator
Pleonastic Phenomenon of Korean and Romanian from the Perspective of Korean Language Educator

Summary/Abstract: Pleonasm appears when a word coexists in the same sentence with a synonym. Thisphenomenon can appear in the form of compound words or words built throughaffixation, or sometimes appears due to the insertion of different vocabulary. Pleonasticphenomena occur more frequently between different language families than betweenthe same lexicon. Therefore, pleonasm between native Korean words and Sino-Koreanwords is easily found in Korean language. This fact brings us to reason whysynonymous words can co-exist with each other while being semantically different.Korean has various lexical forms, thus this phenomenon appears more frequently, incontrast with any other language. It cannot be easily acquired by foreigners learningKorean and is difficult to understand analytically. Since many cases of pleonasticphenomena in Korean result in a change in meaning (as one of the characteristics ofKorean is that pleonastic expressions are usually formed with a Sino-Korean word), itis difficult for Romanian undergraduate students learning Korean, especially thosestudying translation, to recognize this phenomenon. In general, pleonasm in Koreanfrequently occurs in morphological compositions. In addition, redundant expressionsare generally considered to be grammatically incorrect, but some of them are recognizedas a part of standard expressions and are even registered in the dictionary. Even if theyare not recognized as a standard expression, there is also a tendency to tolerate their use.On the other hand, pleonasm in Romanian appears mostly in syntactic compositions,which are mainly expressed as independent sentence components that are repeated, thusin this way the meanings are rarely misinterpreted. In consideration of these points,educators should explain pleonastic phenomena in various structures, and learnersshould also classify them into morphological and syntactic constructions, orconventional and semantic redundancy in order to understand pleonasm in Korean.

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