earticle

영어

This study investigates how adult native speakers of Korean interpret the sentences containing Korean extrinsic plural marker -tul. This morpheme has been known as a distributive marker, by which the element it is attached to is distributed over the agent denoted by a subject nominal. Despite its unique function and disparity in judgments by Korean adult speakers, there has little research to provide a evidence of how it operates in sentence interpretations. In a picture truth value judgement task, participants were asked to compare a target sentence with a picture that either matches or mismatches it, the results showed that adult native speakers of Korean were able to licence the distributive reading when the extrinsic -tul is attached to direct objects or verbs. In addition, the copied -tul attached to a verb was found to be able to restrict its scope only to the verb rather than the verb phrase as a whole. It indicates that the extrinsic -tul plays a role of focus operator to which the element is distributed.