Translingualism on display: Korean–English morphosyntactic reconfiguration in commercial signage

This paper is part of a larger ethnographic study that examines how English linguistic resources are localised and publicly recontextualised in the linguistic landscape of South Korea. A visual ethnographic approach is used to analyse 1,175 cases of commercial signage collected across the country. Focusing on business naming practices, the paper examines English and Korean morphosyntactic resources that are mobilised in business names while remaining locally intelligible. The analysis identifies recurrent patterns in which English-derived resources are adopted into Korean commercial naming or detached from canonical English constraints and locally reshaped. These include English possessive constructions, Korean possessive or affiliative suffixal patterns with English lexical bases, and the extended use of English bound morphemes in both affixal and free-standing forms. The findings suggest that English operates as a flexible semiotic resource within localised Korean business naming practices. In this process, English-derived grammatical fragments are rendered compatible with locally intelligible structures, often producing forms that resist classification as fully English or fully Korean. Rather than simply reproducing English forms, Korean–English commercial naming reworks them through local morphosyntactic resources, complicating clear-cut distinctions between named languages in everyday public discourse.