‘Jackpot!’: How social forces intertwine with language-internal mechanisms to turn Korean noun taypak into an interactive

Abstract

This study investigates how social forces and language-internal mechanisms interact to give rise to stance markers that reflect the speaker’s subjective and intersubjective stance. Using data from the NIKL (Motwuuy) Spoken Corpus and Daily Conversation Corpus and the Sejong Spoken Corpus, we examine how the Korean noun taypak (‘large gourd’) has become culturally associated with good fortune. With the meteoric rise of South Korea as an economic miracle in recent years, the country is also witnessing great economic disparity and more people are tempted to try moving up the socio-economic ladder through taypak, that is, ‘hitting the jackpot’. In this ‘try to get rich quick’ climate, the use of taypak in the sense of ‘hitting the jackpot’ rose in frequency, and its evaluative use (e.g., ‘awesome’) has further developed into an interjection (equivalent to English ‘wow!’). Using a discourse grammar framework, we discuss how language-internal mechanisms such as metonymic extension, conversion, cooptation and (inter)subjectification intertwine with socio-cultural forces to give rise to a near-ubiquitous stance marker that reflects a new cultural trend. The findings of this study contribute to our better understanding of how social factors can influence the development and uses of a common word that we otherwise would hardly notice.