Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

Jae-Hak Yoon (1996)

Temporal Adverbials and Aktionsarten in Korean

Advisor: Craige Roberts

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Abstract:

This is a study of the semantics of temporal expressions in Korean. In particular, it is concerned with tense, temporal adverbials (TAs), and types of verb meanings, or _aktionsarten_, as to how they interact with one another. It aims to undertake explicit and falsifiable descriptions of tense, aktionsarten, and TAs in Korean by applying an event-based model-theoretic semantics, and it also purports to provide a theoretical account for those interactions among them.

The central thesis of this research is that temporal relations are in large part functions of aktionsarten: temporal relations in a sentence are inferred to a large extent from the types of denoted eventualities, as well as from TAs and tense.

Chapter 2 reviews the distributions of major tense and modal markers, and concludes that _-ess_ and _-nun_ can be adequately analyzed as tense markers. It also discusses relations between tense and TAs.

In Chapter 3, types of TAs and predicate meanings are discussed, along with truth conditional definitions for major TAs. It is demonstrated that a systematic non-presuppositional difference exists between a sentence with _tongan/kkaci_ `for/until' and a sentence with _maney/kkaci_ `in/by'. Then, it is argued that they can be accounted only if some part of temporal relations is left to be specified by aktionsarten.

Chapter 4 is concerned with some constructions which apparently exhibit noncompositional modifications of TAs-- noncompositional in the sense that the involved TAs appear to modify only a semantic subpart of the main verb. It proposes an analysis according to which two eventuality variables are introduced in the semantics of verbs of these constructions and these constructions simultaneously describe two eventualities, i.e. the initiating event and its result state.

Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the relative nature of tense and tense neutralization in temporal adverbial clauses. It is demonstrated how tense neutralization is correlated with telicity of predicates and why it is expected in the general theory of relativity of tense and aktionsarten in Korean.