초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper discusses the parts-of-speech system in Korean, proposing several points relevant for the system, claiming that there are two major parts-of-speech in Korean (noun and verb), and thus disregarding the category of adjectives as a major part-of-speech. It is claimed that the principal criterion for establishing the part-of-speech system is distributional facts of lexemes in syntax regarding the possibility of their performing grammatical functions in grammatical constructions, viz ‘functional distribution.’ Upon this criterion, the two parts-of-speech show complementary distribution in terms of grammatical functions. Emphasizing the fact that nouns can occur as adjuncts/modifiers in the grammatical construction of ‘individual-referencing’, this paper claims that those lexemes that have been classified in some recent studies as “adjectives” should be treated as nouns. Further what has been referred to traditionally as “adjectives” having the lexical meaning of property, state, quality, etc. should be classified as a semantics-driven sub-class of the part-of-speech of verb, since they share identical syntactic properties with what has been referred to as “verbs” having the lexical meaning of action or locomotion, etc. Thus the verb in the sense suggested in this paper is sub-classified into action verbs, state verbs, and mentality verbs. It is made clear that differences in distribution among these three sub-verbs are not partof-speech differences but differences due to their lexico-semantic properties. Finally, this paper proposes the notion of ‘syntactic category converter,’ which is defined as a morpheme converting a word/phrase of certain syntactic category to a word/phrase of different syntactic category.
