Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Three Types of Kes-Nominalization in Korean
by Min-Joo Kim
Source: Sematics Archive
In Korean, the Internally Headed Relative Clause Construction (IHRC), illustrated in (1), the Direct Perception Construction (DPC), illustrated in (2), and the factive Propositional Attitude Construction (PAC), illustrated in (3), appear to have an identical syntactic structure: the complements of the verbs consist of clausal material and the grammatical element kes (Kim 1984, Jhang 1994, Chung 1999, Chung and Kim 2003).
(...)
Though these constructions look alike, they differ fundamentally in their interpretations. In the IHRC, the complement denotes an entity, in the DPC it denotes an eventuality, and in the factive PAC it denotes a fact. These differences trace back to the semantics of the embedding predicates, which we can therefore isolate as a defining property of each construction. In this paper, I investigate how these three constructions are similar and how they are dissimilar. I seek to establish that the factive PAC differs sharply from the other two kes-constructions and that there is also a subtle difference between the two constructions as well. I propose that the three constructions behave differently because they describe different semantic relations: the factive PAC describes a part-whole relation between two sets of worlds, whereas the IHRC and the DPC describe relations between two sets of eventualities. But the IHRC and the DPC also differ in that while the former describes an intersection relation, the latter describes a partwhole relation between two sets of eventualities.
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Posted by Tony Marmo
at 01:01 BST
Updated: Saturday, 25 September 2004 06:24 BST
