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Korean Tense andAspect in
Narrative DiscourseEunHee Lee
Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo
The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY
Saffron Korean Linguistics Series Number Six
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Korean Tense and Aspect in Narrative DiscourseEunHee Lee
ISBN-13 9781872843438 | Soft cover
Volume I Number 6, of Saffron Korean Linguistics Series ISSN 1740-2956
Series Editors: Jaehoon Yeon and Jae Jung Song
Published by Saffron Books, EAPGROUP International Media, in conjunction with the Centre ofKorean Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
The publication of this book was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grantfunded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-BAA-2104)
Cover created by Prizmatone Design Consultancy, a division of EAP
Copyright 2013. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form (graphic,electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storageand retrieval systems) without permission of the publisher. Additional copyright information is
available in Acknowledgements
Published by Saffron BooksP O Box 13666
London SW14 8WF United Kingdom
Commissioning Editor: Sajid Rizvi [Editor-in-Chief, EAP]
Telephone +44-[0]20 8392 1122Facsimile +44-[0]20 8392 1122
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Series Editors Note 7
Preface 9
Abbreviations 10
Chapter One | Introduction 11
Chapter Two | Dynamic Analysis of Tense and Aspect 15
2.1Traditional Truth-conditional Analyses of Tense andTheir Problems 15
2.2Dynamic Semantic Approach to Tense and Aspect 22
2.2.1Motivations for Dynamic Approach 22
2.2.2Discourse Representation Theory 24
Chapter Three | Overview of the Korean Tense and Aspect System 35
3.1 Lexical Aspect 37
3.2 Grammatical Aspect 44
3.2.1The Imperfective Forms 44
3.2.2The Perfective Forms 48
3.3 Tense 50
3.3.1The Past Forms 50
3.3.2The Non-past Forms 53
Chapter Four | The Past Forms -essand -essessin Korean 57
4.1 Interpretation of -essand -essessSentences 57
4.1.1Multiple Interpretations of -ess 57 4.1.2Interpretation of -essessSentences and the Difference
between -essand -essess 61
Contents
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4.2 An Analysis of Narrative Discourse 67
4.2.1Narrative Progression with -ess 67
4.2.2Flashback Effect with -essess 72
Chapter Five | The Imperfective Forms -e kaand -e oin Korean 81
5.1Interpretation of -ekaand -e oSentences 82
5.2An Analysis of Narrative Discourse 85
5.2.1Temporal Inclusion with -e o 86
5.2.2Narrative Progression with -e ka 93
Chapter Six | The Perfective Forms -e nohand -e twuin Korean 101
6.1 Interpretation of -e nohand -e twuSentences 101
6.2 An Analysis of Narrative Discourse 106 6.2.1Narrative Progression with -e noh 106
6.2.2Temporal Inclusion with -e twu 114
Chapter Seven | Conclusion 123
Appendix: Operational Tests for Lexical Aspect 125
Bibliography 127
Index 133
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Series Editors Note | 7
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 specic
topics in Korean language and linguistics, will address broadly dened 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
Series Editors Note
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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 t
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
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Abbreviations
Nom Nominative marker
Acc Accusative marker
Top Topic marker
Loc Locative marker
Dat Dative marker
Pos Possessive marker
Pl Plural marker
Cl Classier (counter)
Past Past tense
N.Past Non-past tense
D.Past Double-past form
Imperf Imperfective aspect
Perf Perfective aspect
Dec Declarative sentence ending
Que Question sentence ending
Imp Imperative sentence ending
Sug Suggestion sentence ending
Rel Relative clause
Conj Conjunction
Quot Quotation
Neg Negation
Mod Modality
Cau Causative
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1 | Introduction
This book investigates the semantics of Korean tense and aspect categories from a cross-
linguistic 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 excitingtask. 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), toanalyze and represent the linguistic phenomena. Discourse Representation Theory, as
its name suggests, focuses on the interpretation of discourses, ie, on coherent sequences
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of sentences, also called texts, instead of on isolated sentences, as in traditional formal
semantic theories.
This book deals with Korean tense and aspect. Korean is typologically very
different from the more extensively studied Indo-European languages such as English.
In current linguistic research, there is an increasing interest in the Korean language. One
reason for this is that Korean often provides data not typically found in other languages.
For example, Korean has a rich tense and aspect system, morphological topic marking,
multiple subjects and objects constructions, and case marking on adjuncts, which defy
the traditional distinction between arguments and adjuncts. It also has honorics and a
variety of sentence endings for speech acts and discourse mood, which are not usually
grammatically encoded but only pragmatically inferred in other languages. All these
features make Korean a very useful language for comparative purposes.
Previous studies have provided many insightful descriptive generalisations and
sentence-level formal analyses about important parts of the Korean tense and aspect system(Nam, 1978; C Lee, 1987; H Lee, 1991; Kim, 1992; Sohn, 1995; Ahn, 1995; Yoo, 1996;
Chung, 2007, among others). However, no formal discourse-level analysis has yet been
proposed. The precise semantic and logical characteristics of the temporal and aspectual
expressions that can be understood only with reference to discourse context seem to have
gone unnoticed, or at least have been relatively poorly understood in the literature. To
ll this gap, this book focuses on discourse as a unit of analysis rather than the sentence
structure, which has been the usual analytic unit in formal syntax and static truth conditional
semantics. Therefore, the Fregean idea that sentences refer to truth values is abandoned
in this book. Sentential analyses treat reference times as completely undetermined, or as
simply given by extralinguistic context. However, it seems clear that the manner in which
the reference time is extracted from the linguistic context may depend on the tenses of
the sentence and its preceding sentences. In other words, in a context, various temporal
relations between events described by the sentences can be observed; and based on this
observation, numerous temporal inferences can be made about what happened when
(ter Meulen, 1995). Throughout this book, we will observe why sentence-level formal
analyses fall short of the demands of natural language tense in general and Korean tense
and aspect in particular, and how dynamic methods can help capture the semantics ofthose forms more accurately. Moreover, most of the researchers on this subject have not
examined naturally occurring discourse in which the tense morphemes are used, relying
instead on their intuitions supported only by invented examples. In this book, I will look
at narrative discourse data from corpus and describe how the tense markers are naturally
used. The data used in this study is taken from the adapted Seyjong Written corpus,
which is an abridged version of the Seyjong corpus jointly published by the National
Korean Language Institute and the Department of Tourism and Culture in Korea. The
compilation is based on 10 different genres and topics including novels, science, general,
humanities (ie, anthropology, philosophy), newspapers, art and life, essays, education
and society. I chose written narratives, as opposed to conversational data, because the
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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 semanticsnicely 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 kaand -a/e o, and the
perfective forms -a/e nohand -a/e twu,1the semantic distinction between which cannotbe 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
-essessin 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
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dynamic context-shifter and static context-preserver in the level of discourse. Chapter 5
is concerned with the pair of auxiliary verbs -e kaand -e o, expressing the progressive in
Korean, while Chapter 6analyses the meaning and use of -e nohand -e twu, which have
been assumed to express perfects in Korean. These two chapters will show that the same
principle applies to these auxiliary verb pairs as well. Chapter 7concludes this book
by summarising the main points, discussing the implications of the novel perspective
gained by the dynamic approach to the Korean tense and aspect system, and suggesting
further related study. Although only a few grammatical markers of Korean tense and
aspect are discussed in depth in this book, the underlying mechanism controlling their
use, I believe, will reveal a very important and interesting cognitive aspect of human
reasoning with respect to the ow of time and its linguistic parameterisation. Moreover,
readers who are not primarily interested in the topic of tense and aspect will also benet
from learning the current research methods of dynamic semantics and the contemporary
issues at the forefront of natural language semantics.
Note1The 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 -e-
elsewhere. I will represent them hereafter as -ess, -essess, e ka, -e o, -e noh, and -e twu.
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