Korean Linguistics - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2014

This paper presents a series of experiments designed to shed light on some aspects of the use and interpretation of so-called ‘extrinsic -tul’ by child and adult native speakers of Korean. Our findings indicate that this morpheme occurs far less frequently than the intrinsic plural marker in both speech and writing, and that it is most likely to appear on an adverb. An experiment designed to confirm its oft-claimed status as a distributive marker reveals that whereas adults systematically interpret it in this way, children under the age of 8 rarely do, even when appropriate contextual support is provided.

This article analyzes the Korean [X-ko iss-ta] construction from the perspective of construal-based semantics, where the speaker’s choice and the grammatical context play an important role. The [X-ko iss-ta] construction exhibits ambiguity between the Progressive and the Resultant meanings. I argue that the Progressive reading is associated with the accomplishment construal of the construction, while the Resultant reading is associated with the achievement construal. I further argue that this type of alternative construal is motivated by the granularity observed ubiquitously in our everyday language. In terms of the function of -ko iss-, I argue that it segments out a smaller portion of the profiled semantic contour for focused viewing — an advantageous perspective from which to analyze stative verbs. My construal-based semantic analysis overcomes difficulties left by the previous proposals on the same topic.

The purpose of this paper is to categorize Korean HI-causatives. Kim (1998) suggests a division into bi-clausal compositional causatives and mono-clausal lexical causatives. According to her suggestion, while compositional HI-causatives possess two verbs, lexical HI-causatives possess only one, since when the originally causative meaning is lost, the verb becomes one lexical item. However, some of the examples she provides cannot be accepted intuitively. An experiment was carried out in order to prove it. Each subject was given eight sentences, five with lexical and three with compositional causative verbs, and was asked to choose from among two pictures which they considered corresponding to the given sentence. Contrary to Kim’s (1998) suggestion, the result shows that Korean native speakers do not consider that HI-causatives are divided into two categories, compositional and lexical, but, instead, they are on a continuum from direct to indirect meaning semantically. According to this experiment, the continuum has mek-HI-ta ‘cause to eat’ at one end and pes-HI-ta ‘cause to take off’ at the far end. In addition, HI-causatives are context-sensitive, so that the context should be considered when native speakers use them.

This study explores the use of keywords in proverbs in Korean, English, Chinese, and Indonesian. The study applies the traditional corpus linguistic tools of frequency and ranking to the keywords found in proverbs in an attempt to characterize the proverbs of these languages. The frequency data show that English proverbs are dominated by abstract keywords like “love, God, age, foolishness, wisdom, poverty, good, evil, and truth.” On the other hand, Chinese proverbs are dominated by more “action oriented” and “pragmatic concern” keywords such as “heart, time, talk/say, act/do, words, method, and knowledge,” showing a clear divergence from the frequency structure of English proverb keywords. Surprisingly, Korean proverb keywords, just like the English keywords, are also found to share very little in common with Chinese, a longstanding neighbor which has strongly influenced the cultural life of Korea over the last two millennia. Instead, the data show that the proverb keyword structure most resembles that of Indonesian, both having material/physical terms dominating the keywords and both sharing three common top-ranking keywords: water, dog, and cow.