earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to re-examine the ‘i’ category as adjective focused on the negational form of the ‘derivational noun(N+적)+ida’. In the previous studies, the negational form of ‘ida’ has been regarded as ‘anida’ exclusively, however, the predicative nucleus of ‘ida’ construction is not ‘i’ but the element before ‘i’, therefore the negational form of ‘i’ can be changed according to the preceding element of ‘i’, such as ‘-지 않-’ in the case of ‘derivational noun(N+적)’. ‘derivational noun(N+적)’ is the most marked among the nouns which are located before ‘i’, it has adjectival meaning due to ‘-적’ and shows the long negational form ‘-지 않-’ like adjective. Although the ‘i’ shows the characteristics of adjective like long negational form, the word class of ‘i’ can not be adjective. The reasons are such as followings: First, the preceding element of ‘i’, such as ‘derivational noun(N+적)’ is the morphological and syntactical nucleus, so the ‘i’ is not the lexical category, but the functional category. Second, there are great differences between the general adjectives and ‘i’. Third, ‘derivational noun(N+적)+ida’ corresponds to adjective or verb from the perspective of contrastive linguistics, so the ‘i’ solely cannot be adjective excluding ‘derivational noun(N+적)’. Fourth, if the copula ‘i’ would be adjectives, it disagrees with the characteristics of the korean language as verb-like adjectives which functions as predicate without copula.