Korean Tense and Aspect in Narrative Discourse (sample)

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Korean Tense and Aspect in Narrative Discourse


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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)

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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

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London SW14 8WF United Kingdom

Commissioning Editor: Sajid Rizvi [Editor-in-Chief, EAP]

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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

6 | KOREANTENSEAN DASPECTINNARRATIVEDISCOURSE | EUNHEELEE


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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

[email protected] [email protected]

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

Preface | 9


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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

Chapter 1|Introduction | 11


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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

Chapter 1|Introduction | 13


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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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Korean Tense and Aspect in Narrative Discourse (sample)

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