earticle

영어

This study offers a corpus-based analysis of the polysemy of the motion verbs go and come in English and kata ‘go’ and ota ‘come’ in Korean. Both motion verbs in English and Korean are intrinsically deictic indicating directionality in their nature. In this study, using corpus-data, we first discuss the prototypical meaning of go/come in English and kata/ota in Korean, focusing on their cross-linguistic differences existing in the use of these motion verbs. Furthermore, we examine the metaphorical meaning extension of the motion verbs, and compare their uses. In this corpus-based analysis of the motion verbs, we point out that the semantic extension of the motion verbs in both languages occur from the spatial domain to the non-spatial domains, and it generally involves time, perspective and change of state. Nevertheless, the metaphorical uses of the motion verbs in English differ from those of Korean. Finally, we point out some limitations in the previous analyses of the semantic extensions of motion verbs, and propose the concept of merge and separation as a new way of analyzing the phenomena