earticle

영어

Kim, Joung Ran(2010) argued that the meaning of Korean topic and conditional sentences can be appropriately represented by the set inclusion relation. This article explores if the semantic structure of the set inclusion relation has the syntactic basis. It is first shown that the topic phrase and the conditional clause consistently have wider semantic scope than the negation in the sentence they appear. This fact suggests that they appear in the left branch occupying the higher position in the tree than the negation which is embedded in the right branch as the sentence form a bipartite structure. The Hua data reported by Haiman (1978) also suggest the surface bipartite structure for topic and conditional sentences in Hua. Then the author concludes that the set inclusion relation is derived from the syntactic bipartite structure, which is in turn translated into the set inclusion relation during the semantic processing. It is also argued that the Korean particle -nun seems to be the marker for the surface bipartite structure.