earticle

영어

This paper aims to show that we can capture the semantics of different topic sentences and conditional sentences in Korean using Venn diagrams. It is first claimed that the topic sentence in Korean can be represented by the inclusion relation between the two sets, one representing the topic ‘-nun’ phrase and the other representing the rest of the sentence. This structure, representing the inclusion relation between the two sets is called the Basic Structure. Then it is argued that the other two types of ‘-nun’ phrases, Contrastive Topic and List Contrastive Topic, can be represented by some variations of the Basic Structure, and the variations are called the Contrastive Pair Structure and the Repetitive Structure, respectively. This three-way representation system is useful for representing conditional sentences, too. All three types of conditional sentences are also found, and they can be effectively represented by the Basic Sturucture, the Contrastive Pair Structure, and the Repetitive Structure