As, ddeugeo(b)! ‘Oh, hot!’: Some Mysteries of bieub (Ir)regular Adjectives in Colloquial Korean

In spoken Japanese, adjectives are used in clipped (or shortened) forms like ita, itta, ite ‘painful.’ A similar phenomenon can also be observed in colloquial Korean. Focusing on bieub (ir)regular adjectives (e.g., mugeobda ‘heavy’), the present study identifies two types of clipped forms: bieub-absent form (e.g., mugeo) and bieub-present form (e.g., mugeob). A questionnaire survey was conducted on Korean native speakers to investigate the use of thirteen bieub (ir)regular adjectives in the two clipped forms. The results revealed that the bieub-absent form is characterized by four factors (semantic, morphological, phonological, and sociopragmatic factors), while the bieub-absent form mainly involves two factors (morphological and sociopragmatic factors). It is suggested that adjectives with the stem vowel -eo are preferred in the bieub-absent form due to the influence of phonological contraction and the increasing use of the bieub-present form is motivated by the widespread adoption of computer-mediated communication (CMC).