A Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and Korean Using a Parallel Corpus - Focusing on Korean Equivalents of the Chinese Negative Adverbs ‘bu’ and ‘mei’

This study aims to identify effective strategies for applying corpora to Chinese-Korean contrastive research and to propose an appropriate analytic methodology. After revisiting the theoretical foundations of Contrastive Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics, we surveyed domestic studies published between 2000 and 2024 to trace research trends and limitations. The review shows that, while Chinese-Korean contrastive studies have progressed steadily, their quantitative growth and disciplinary breadth remain limited; moreover, corpus-based research conducted by Korean scholars is comparatively scarce. Although the parallel corpus is the most frequently employed resource, analysis has been heavily biased toward Korean grammatical items, leaving Chinese-oriented investigations underrepresented. To address this imbalance, we present a detailed contrastive procedure using a parallel corpus focused on the Chinese negative adverbs ‘bu’ and ‘mei’. The proposed workflow transcends text-level description by integrating prosodic, lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic dimensions, thereby offering a practical model to overcome current constraints and to foster both quantitative and qualitative advancement in future studies.