earticle

영어

It has been widely believed in the field of Korean linguistics that Korean Language has a tense system as in European languages. I argue that Korean Language does not have a tense as a grammatical category. Under this hypothesis, the morphosyntactic status of the Korean temporal elements is characterized as the following. 1)'-nun-' is not a morpheme as a syntactic unit. If we assume that '-nun-' is a single morpheme that is positioned in a node on a syntactic structure, we lead to a totally ad hoc account of the realizations of the allomorphs. 2)'-te-' is not a morpheme as a syntactic unit, on similar grounds. 3)'-essess-' is not a combination of two syntactic units, but one morpheme marking a subcategory of aspect. 4)'-ko iss-' and '-e iss-' are not single syntactic units, but elements that belong to the different phrases, building into a complex sentence structure. 5)The adnominal clause marker '-un' and '-ul' are morphophonological realizations of '-ess-nun' and '-keyss-nun', respectively. 6)'-ess-' is not a tense, but an aspect element.