earticle

영어

Functional typological studies such as Givón(1984, 2001) and Kim(2015) show that a certain semantic domain may be under-coded in one language while it may be over-coded in another language; the same semantic domain may be encoded by one grammatical device in one language while encoded by more than one grammatical device in another language. This study compares English and Korean grammatical devices encoding semantic domains in the phases of the event, revealing that the initial phase of the event is over-coded in Korean while the final phase is over-coded in English. It also argues that these two different coding patterns are closely related to the typological characteristics of the two languages: (i) English has the same case marker for Associative and Instrumental cases while Korean has two distinct markers for them; and (ii) English allows an inanimate subject in the prototypical transitive clauses while Korean does not. These two different coding systems reflect the two different cultures’ way of thinking: Koreans tend to focus the participant’s inherent mental and physical capacity while English speaking people tend to focus the participant’s real role and the resultative state of the event