earticle

영어

This paper aims to study on a phenomenon where adverbials are strongly needed for Korean middle constructions in light of semantics and pragmatics. First, in light of pragmatics, it was found that middle construction is a universal phenomenon in typology, in which case adverbial is also strongly required in many languages. In the process, the prototypical features of middle constructions were discovered, which leads to the notion that they describe the general properties of generic subject ultimately. It was found in this study that the attributes of generic subject in the middle constructions can be applied to anyone, and these universal features originate from implicit argument. In addition, the attributes of subject cannot be explained enough only with semantic information of middle verbs so the middle construction itself lacks in information regardless of valency. This lack of informativeness is complemented by the role of “adverbial,” and this paper, with a focus on pragmatics, described that adverbial has a function of relational new information. Meanwhile, with regard to the informatively domain by adverbial, some cases were explored where several verbal elements were simultaneously involved to provide informativeness for the middle constructions, which resulted in the finding that the informative role of adverbial relatively decreases when the focus markers “i/ka” are added to the subject, but still remains larger than when combined with demonstrative and subject.