A contrastive study of person names in Korean and Japanese based on TV dramas: Focus on full names

Abstract

This study aims to clarify the use of person names, in particular that of full names, in modern Korean and Japanese. A person name is often the first appellation for many people, which is given when they are born or even before their birth, as a label to uniquely identify themselves within the social community they belong to. It is perhaps the most essential form of identification of individuals, the use of which is indispensable to establishing and maintaining everyday human interactions. Researches on person address terms have so far overwhelmingly focused on personal pronouns and kinship terms, and the use of person names, particularly of full names, have been neglected in the current Korean-Japanese cultural and linguistic literature. The present study fills a gap of previous studies, and explores the use of full names in Korean and Japanese. Based on an analysis of data drawn from three series of Japanese TV dramas and their remake versions of Korean dramas, it characterises Korean being “full name oriented” and Japanese being “family name oriented”. Furthermore, it proposes two functions, ‘formal identification’ and ‘emphasis of emotions’, for full names. Significantly, Japanese lacks the ‘emphasis of emotions’ function and it is a main cause for an extremely low frequency rate of full names in Japanese.