Earticle

Lim, Dongsik. 2015. On Korean Auxiliary Verb ‘-(e)cita’: an l-syntax Approach. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 40-4, 661-673. This paper aims to present the distribution of Korean auxiliary verb ‘-(e)cita’, and analyze it in the view of lexicon-syntax (l-syntax, Hale and Keyser 2002, Zubizarreta and Oh 2007, among many others). Specifically, following Lim and Zubizarreta (2012), here I argue that ‘-(e)cita’ is a spell-out form of the functional head of directed motion constructions. I also argue that in this analysis we can explain both the distribution of -(e)cita’ and its meaning, on the one hand, and its modal meaning (specifically possibility), on the other hand. (Hongik University)

Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000) proposed a conceptual analysis of motion events and a typological distinction between satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages according to whether the core component Path is mapped onto a verb or a satellite. According to Talmy’s bipartite typological work on directed motion constructions, Korean has been classified as a verb-framed language. Slobin and Hoiting (1994) and Slobin (2004), however, proposed a tripartite typology of directed motion constructions instead of Talmy’s bipartite typology: verb-framed, satellite-framed and equipollently-framed languages. In equipollently-framed languages, both Path and Manner have roughly equal morphosyntactic status; in other words, Path and Manner are expressed by equivalent grammatical forms. In this paper, we argue that it is more appropriate to classify Korean as an equipollently-framed language by showing that Korean is a serial-verb language.

The aim of this paper is to propose a typology of how languages differ in packaging specific semantic elements into the verb and the goal complement in directed motion expressions. We build on the nanosyntactic approach to crosslinguistic variation in directed motion constructions, as proposed by Son and Svenonius (2008),and provide supporting experimental data. Three language types are distinguished based on the lexicalization patterns of the semantic elements PathGOAL and Dir, exemplified by Korean, Russian, and English. Our experimental study reveals a strong association between the presence of an overt goal and the use of the deictic motion verb ka-tain Korean, which we attribute to the encoding of PathGOAL in ka-ta. In contrast, no such correlation was observed in English and Russian, in which PathGOAL is not lexicalized by verbs. English and Russian differ in that English manner-of-motion verbs do not encode Dir, while Russian manner-of-motion verbs distinguish unidirectional and multidirectional motions through verbal stem variation. This difference results in the distinctive use of unidirectional verbs in Russian for unidirectional motion events both with and without overt goals, whereas in English, there are no specific patterns related to directionality.