Korean Tense and Aspect in Narrative Discourse

Sa f fron Korea n Li ng u istics Ser ie s Nu mber Si x

Korean Tense and

Aspect in
Narrative Discourse
EunHee Lee
Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo
The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY

Korean Tense and Aspect in Narrative Discourse

EunHee 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 of
Korean Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
The publication of this book was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (KSPS) Grant
funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-BAA-2104)
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Contents

Series Editors Note

Preface
Abbreviations

7
9
10

Chapter One | Introduction

11

Chapter Two | Dynamic Analysis of Tense and Aspect

15

2.1 Traditional Truth-conditional Analyses of Tense and
Their Problems
15

2.2 Dynamic Semantic Approach to Tense and Aspect
22
2.2.1 Motivations for Dynamic Approach
22
2.2.2 Discourse Representation Theory
24
Chapter Three | Overview of the Korean Tense and Aspect System

3.1 Lexical Aspect

3.2 Grammatical Aspect
3.2.1 The Imperfective Forms
3.2.2 The Perfective Forms

3.3 Tense
3.3.1 The Past Forms
3.3.2 The Non-past Forms

35
37
44
44
48
50
50
53

Chapter Four | The Past Forms -ess and -essess in Korean

57

4.1 Interpretation of -ess and -essess Sentences
57
4.1.1 Multiple Interpretations of -ess
57
4.1.2 Interpretation of -essess Sentences and the Difference

between -ess and -essess
61


4.2 An Analysis of Narrative Discourse
4.2.1 Narrative Progression with -ess
4.2.2 Flashback Effect with -essess

67
67
72

Chapter Five | The Imperfective Forms -e ka and -e o in Korean

5.1 Interpretation of -eka and -e o Sentences

5.2 An Analysis of Narrative Discourse
5.2.1 Temporal Inclusion with -e o
5.2.2 Narrative Progression with -e ka

81
82
85
86
93

Chapter Six | The Perfective Forms -e noh and -e twu in Korean

6.1 Interpretation of -e noh and -e twu Sentences

6.2 An Analysis of Narrative Discourse
6.2.1 Narrative Progression with -e noh
6.2.2 Temporal Inclusion with -e twu

101
101
106
106
114

Chapter Seven | Conclusion

123

Appendix: Operational Tests for Lexical Aspect

125

Bibliography

127

Index

133

 | Korean Tense and A spect in Narrative D iscourse | EunH ee L ee

Series Editors Note

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 specific
topics in Korean language and linguistics, will address broadly defined 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

|

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 fit
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

|

Abbreviations

Nom
Acc
Top
Loc
Dat
Pos
Pl
Cl
Past
N.Past
D.Past
Imperf
Perf
Dec
Que
Imp
Sug
Rel
Conj
Quot
Neg
Mod
Cau

Nominative marker
Accusative marker
Topic marker
Locative marker
Dative marker
Possessive marker
Plural marker
Classifier (counter)
Past tense
Non-past tense
Double-past form
Imperfective aspect
Perfective aspect
Declarative sentence ending
Question sentence ending
Imperative sentence ending
Suggestion sentence ending
Relative clause
Conjunction
Quotation
Negation
Modality
Causative

10 | Korean Tense and A spect in Narrative D iscourse | EunH ee L ee

1 | Introduction

This book investigates the semantics of Korean tense and aspect categories from a crosslinguistic 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 exciting
task. 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), to
analyze 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

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 honorifics 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
fill 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 of
those 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
12 | Korean Tense and A spect in Narrative D iscourse | EunH ee L ee

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 semantics
nicely 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 ka and -a/e o, and the
perfective forms -a/e noh and -a/e twu,1 the semantic distinction between which cannot
be 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
-essess in 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

dynamic context-shifter and static context-preserver in the level of discourse. Chapter 5

is concerned with the pair of auxiliary verbs -e ka and -e o, expressing the progressive in
Korean, while Chapter 6 analyses the meaning and use of -e noh and -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 7 concludes 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 flow of time and its linguistic parameterisation. Moreover,
readers who are not primarily interested in the topic of tense and aspect will also benefit
from learning the current research methods of dynamic semantics and the contemporary
issues at the forefront of natural language semantics.

Note
1

The 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 -eelsewhere. I will represent them hereafter as -ess, -essess, e ka, -e o, -e noh, and -e twu.

14 | Korean Tense and A spect in Narrative D iscourse | EunH ee L ee