A Study on the Vietnamese Equivalents of the Korean Particle ‘(으)로’ Using a Korean-Vietnamese Parallel Corpus

This study investigates how the Korean adverbial case particle ‘(eu)ro’ when used with directional meaning, is realized in Vietnamese through a corpus-based analysis using Korean -Vietnamese parallel data constructed by the National Institute of the Korean Language. While Korean, as an agglutinative language, conveys grammatical functions through case particles, Vietnamese, a typical isolating language, relies on word order and serial verb constructions (SVC) to express such meanings. The particle ‘(eu)ro’ in Korean, which indicates direction, does not correspond to a single lexical item in Vietnamese but is instead distributed across various verb combinations or implied within single verbs. The findings reveal that in spoken Vietnamese, both single-verb structures (e.g., đi, đến, về) and serial verb constructions (e.g., đi đến, đi vao) appear in nearly equal proportions. In contrast, written Vietnamese favors serial verb constructions such as trở về and quay trở lại, reflecting its tendency toward more elaborate expressions. These results demonstrate that the directional meaning of ‘(eu)ro’ in Korean is realized through structurally and semantically diverse patterns in Vietnamese. The study provides empirical insights that can inform Korean language education, bilingual dictionary development, translation studies, and contrastive linguistics involving Vietnamese.