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Contents
7
9
10
11
35
37
44
44
48
50
50
53
4.2 An Analysis of Narrative Discourse
4.2.1 Narrative Progression with -ess
4.2.2 Flashback Effect with -essess
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72
81
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93
101
101
106
106
114
123
125
Bibliography
127
Index
133
This is the sixth volume in Saffron Korean Linguistics Series, published by Saffron
Books in conjunction with the Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, University of London.
The series is devoted particularly to functionally and/or typologically orientated research
on Korean language and linguistics. Volumes in the series, while dealing with specific
topics in Korean language and linguistics, will address broadly defined functional and/or
typological issues and concerns, rather than matters of abstract theoretical polemics.
Theoretical or applied work related to Korean language will also be considered. The
series aims to offer an international academic forum for the dissemination of the latest
research into Korean linguistics as well as Korean language studies.
We welcome manuscripts on any aspect of Korean linguistics and language study,
including Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Typology,
Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Language Acquisition, Historical Linguistics, and
Korean Language Teaching. Submission enquiries should initially be addressed to Jaehoon
Yeon. Manuscripts or abstracts for book proposals must be submitted simultaneously to both
the Series Editors. Contributors whose native language is not English are strongly advised
to have their manuscripts read, and revised where warranted, by native speakers.
Jaehoon Yeon
Jae Jung Song
Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS Department of English and Linguistics
University of London
University of Otago
London WC1H 0XG
PO Box 56, Dunedin
United Kingdom
New Zealand
jy1@soas.ac.uk
jaejung.song@otago.ac.nz
September 2013
|
Preface
In this book I inquire into the semantics of tense and aspect in Korean, focusing on
the behaviour of tense and aspect morphemes in discourse. This work grew out of my
doctoral dissertation (Lee, 2000). However, it has been radically revised, and a great
deal of new materials has been incorporated into the current version. For example, I have
newly incorporated recent studies on the topic, corpus studies, and more detailed formal
semantic representations using Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle, 1993).
Parts of Chapters Four and Six of this book have appeared as journal articles (Lee, 2003;
Lee, 2006; Lee, 2007) but they have also undergone revision and been rewritten to fit
the topic of this book.
There are many people to thank. I am grateful to Alice GB ter Meulen, who
was my graduate adviser, Frank Zwarts, Henk Verkuyl and Tim Stowell, who were my
dissertation committee members, the faculty and colleagues at the Indiana University,
UCLA, and the University at Buffalo. I also thank my family members for their love
and support.
EunHee Lee, 2013
Preface
|
Abbreviations
Nom
Acc
Top
Loc
Dat
Pos
Pl
Cl
Past
N.Past
D.Past
Imperf
Perf
Dec
Que
Imp
Sug
Rel
Conj
Quot
Neg
Mod
Cau
Nominative marker
Accusative marker
Topic marker
Locative marker
Dative marker
Possessive marker
Plural marker
Classifier (counter)
Past tense
Non-past tense
Double-past form
Imperfective aspect
Perfective aspect
Declarative sentence ending
Question sentence ending
Imperative sentence ending
Suggestion sentence ending
Relative clause
Conjunction
Quotation
Negation
Modality
Causative
1 | Introduction
This book investigates the semantics of Korean tense and aspect categories from a crosslinguistic perspective. Tense and aspect provide information about whether the situation
described by a sentence has been completed or is ongoing, and when it occurred. For
example, a sentence such as I ate an apple conveys the aspectual properties of the verb
(it has a built-in endpoint, ie, telic, and durative) and tells us that the eating event was
completed at some time in the past. Natural language phenomena that concern tense
present one of the ideal research areas for formal semanticists. A rich philosophical
and logical tradition concerning time and tense exists, and the syntax of so-called
functional categories, which include tense morphemes, has recently attracted a lot of
attention. Bringing together the two traditions to produce new insights is an exciting
task. Despite the fact that its invisibility and intangibility renders it elusive, time has a
robust ontological status, and how time gets linguistically encoded in various languages
is a very interesting area to explore.
Interpreting tense is context-dependent because it often requires knowledge of the
time the sentence is uttered (speech time) and its temporal relationship to the situation
described by prior sentences in discourse. Traditional syntactic and semantic theories only
deal with sentence structure and meaning, but a shift in focus is underway in semantics
away from a semantic approach that views the meaning solely as the condition under which
a sentence is true abstracted from discourse context (truth-conditional semantics) towards
a more dynamic approach with special emphasis on context-dependent interpretation.
Furthermore, advances in computer technology and the production of large corpus materials
have allowed linguists to overcome a heavy reliance on personal intuitions supported only
by invented examples. In this book, I work with corpus material and look at narrative
discourse to quantitatively describe how certain linguistic forms such as a past tense
marker are used. The corpus examples inform the particular formal analyses I propose.
I employ dynamic semantic formal tool, Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and
Reyle, 1993; van Eijck and Kamp, 1997; Kamp, H van Genabith, and Reyle, 2005), to
analyze and represent the linguistic phenomena. Discourse Representation Theory, as
its name suggests, focuses on the interpretation of discourses, ie, on coherent sequences
Chapter 1 | Introduction
| 11
main interest is on the use of tense as establishing anaphoric relations among sentences
in texts. In non-narrative discourse such as face-to-face conversation, tense is used
deictically, ie, it temporally relates the event time to the utterance time. In contrast, in
narrative discourse, tense establishes a temporal relationship not only between the event
time and the utterance time, but also between the event times of different sentences in
the discourse (Caenepeel, 1989, 1995; Caenepeel and Sandstrom, 1992; Caenepeel and
Moens, 1994; Smith, 2003).
As I have mentioned, dynamic semantics is replacing static truth conditional
semantics, which views meaning as the condition under which a sentence is true or false
in the given state of affairs (also called a model in formal semantics). In dynamic
semantics, interpretation is viewed dynamically as the incremental process of updating
the given context with the content of a new expression, rather than simply specifying the
truth-conditions of individual sentences in total possible worlds abstracted from context.
By taking context-change potential as the meaning of a sentence, dynamic semantics
nicely blends semantic and pragmatic issues in a coherent account of context updates.
Updates constitute either a dyamic or stative operation on the given context. Dynamic
context-shifters change the current temporal reference, updating the context with a later
episode, whereas static context-preservers maintain the current context, providing a more
detailed description of it (ter Meulen, 1995). Dynamic semantics provides us with a way
of distinguishing truth-conditionally-equivalent sentences in terms of the way information
is given. The logical tool that I will use in this book is Discourse Representation Theory
(DRT, Kamp and Reyle, 1993). DRT has been developed as a dynamic toolkit to account
for nominal and temporal anaphora in English discourse. Its dynamic interpretation and
central notion of situated inference incorporate context as an essential part of meaning
and provide a systematic, algorithmic procedure to graphically represent the meanings
of temporal and aspectual expressions in English discourse. In this book, I conduct a
comparative study on Korean that will contribute to the cross-linguistic account of tense
and aspect and whose underlying mechanism can be applied to other languages as well.
In particular, this book shows that two closely related temporal marker pairs, such as
the past forms -a/ess and -a/essess, the progressive forms -a/e ka and -a/e o, and the
perfective forms -a/e noh and -a/e twu,1 the semantic distinction between which cannot
be captured truth-conditionally, have distinct discourse-updating functions.
This book consists of seven chapters. Chapter 2 discusses inadequacies of
classical truth-conditional treatment of tenses, which is based on tense operators and the
ontology of temporal instants and intervals. Dynamic approaches to semantics of tense
and aspect are then introduced along with a detailed description of DRT. Chapter 3
provides an overview of the Korean tense and aspect system, discussing lexical aspects,
grammatical aspects such as progressive and perfective, and tenses such as past and
present. In Chapter 4, I discuss and analyse the meaning of the past forms -ess and
-essess in Korean using narrative data and provide a DRT analysis of these forms. I show
that the semantic distinction between the two is revealed in dynamic semantics as the
Chapter 1 | Introduction
| 13
Note
1
The variation between a and e in these forms is phonologically determined by the last vowel
of the verb stem to which they are attached; -a- when the last vowel is /a/ or /o/, and -eelsewhere. I will represent them hereafter as -ess, -essess, e ka, -e o, -e noh, and -e twu.