A Morphological Analysis of Korean Pronoun Usage in Han Gyeong Chal's Summer Breeze Webtoon

Abstract

Korean pronouns (daemyeongsa) constitute an important component of Korean morphology because their forms and usage are closely associated with interpersonal relationships, honorification, and sociocultural context. Although webtoons have increasingly been recognized as authentic resources for Korean language learning and linguistic research, studies examining the morphological characteristics of Korean pronouns in webtoon dialogues remain limited. This study aims to identify the types of Korean pronouns and analyze their frequency of occurrence in the first twelve chapters of Han Gyeong Chal's 썸머브리즈 (Summer Breeze) from a morphological perspective. A descriptive qualitative approach was employed, complemented by quantitative frequency analysis. The data consisted of dialogue texts extracted from the first twelve chapters of the original Korean-language webtoon and were collected using observation and note-taking techniques. Pronouns were identified, classified according to standard Korean grammatical categories, and analyzed based on their morphological characteristics and contextual usage. The analysis identified 447 pronoun tokens, comprising 306 personal pronouns and 141 demonstrative pronouns. Among the personal pronouns, the informal first-person singular pronoun 나 (na) was the most frequently used, occurring 89 times, whereas 이이 (ii) and 아무 (amu) each appeared only once. The findings also reveal the occurrence of regional dialect variants associated with the Jeolla dialect, indicating that pronoun realization is influenced not only by grammatical structure but also by sociolinguistic factors. Overall, the study demonstrates that pronoun selection in Summer Breeze systematically reflects interpersonal relationships, communicative situations, and regional linguistic identity. These findings contribute to Korean morphological studies by providing empirical evidence from authentic webtoon dialogues and highlight the potential of webtoons as valuable linguistic corpora for Korean language research and teaching.