Referring expressions in English and Korean political news

Referring expressions have been a topic of debate in the philosophy of language and in pragmatics, and numerous research studies have been put forward on the basis of constructed texts or naturally occurring discourses. Nevertheless, not much attention has been paid to uncover how referential terms are deployed in written media discourse, including news articles, particularly from a contrastive perspective. Political news articles provide a suitable starting point for a discussion of referring expressions, as public figures are deemed the most prominent news actors. This paper investigates what types of referring expressions are used in English and Korean political news and how they are related to the activation or accessibility of the entities to which they are intended to refer. For this purpose, two sets of data are sampled from several online news sites, and referring expressions in the data are extracted for the analysis. The results of the analysis suggest that the use of the referential terms in the two languages conform to the memory activation or accessibility scale theories. In addition, the varying range of deployed referential terms in the two languages is accounted for in terms of different discursive conventions in the two linguistic communities.