ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

While previous research on Korean personal names has predominantly focused on the framework of sound symbolism, this study posits that contemporary naming trends and the structural properties of Korean names necessitate an analysis at the syllable level. We aim to demonstrate that both the characteristicsand distributionof syllables serve as key factors in gender differentiationin Korean given names. Focusing on the top-500 most popular names across decades from the 1940s to the 2020s, we assigned a gender-bias scoreto each syllable based on its gender- specific relative usage. The analysis was conducted along two main axes: syllable properties(examining phoneme usage and intra-syllabic combinations) and syllable distribution(investigating positional effects initial vs. final and inter-syllabic pairings). The results indicate that the composition of consonants and vowels does not show significant gender-specific differences. However, the effect of phonological combinations was found to be highly contingent on the syllable's position. Regarding distribution, over half of all syllables displayed position- sensitive gender bias, and in name-level combinations, the final syllable exhibited a stronger gender-diagnostic weightthan the initial syllable. Collectively, these findings suggest that gender differentiation in Korean names is primarily governed by positional and distributional regularities at the syllable level, moving beyond the limitations of absolute phoneme-level symbolism.

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