earticle

영어

This paper examines the phenomenon of lexical conflation, in which expressions consisting of two or more lexical items in Korean are realized as a single lexical item in English, focusing on two major types in such cross-linguistic correspondences. The first type concerns the conflation of serial verb constructions in Korean and lexically single verbs in English. The discussion on this first type is divided into two subcategories: 1) motion verbs; 2) perception and ‘give’ type verbs. Lexically coded conflations in English are discussed, along with their syntactic effects. The second type of conflation discussed concerns the three expressions with a noun included in Korean and their corresponding lexically-shortened counterparts in English. The first subcategory of these expressions concerns the expressions for specific spatial relations in Korean, which are realized by the ‘noun+postposition ey’ combination in Korean and by a single, specific preposition in English. The second subcategory concerns expressions for weather, which are realized by a ‘noun+verb’ combination in Korean and by the impersonal ‘it is’ construction with a single verb in English. The third subcategory concerns size-related expressions, which are realized by the ‘noun+adjective’ combinations in Korean and by single gradable adjectives in English. It is argued in this paper that the five expressions all demonstrate a much stronger lexical tendency toward conflation in English than in Korean.