Content area
Full Text
Yoo, Myung Hye. 2021. Decomposing -(e)ci and bare inchoatives in Korean. Linguistic Research 38(3): 491-535. Korean deadjectival verbs have two forms. First, there are predicates that do not require additional morphemes from their stative forms to mean a change of state, hereafter referred to as bare inchoatives. The other type of inchoatives must combine with the morpheme -(e)ci- after the root form to contain the meaning of the change of state. The bare inchoatives reach the absolute standard of degree achievements as a result of the change of the state, while -(e)ci denotes the event where the degree property of an entity becomes greater than the previous one. This -(e)ci morpheme has been traditionally considered as a BECOME operator. This paper, however, proposes an alternative semantic analysis of -(e)ci morpheme and its syntactic structure by adopting the concept of the measure of change function. The bare inchoatives have one degree phrase (DP), while the -(e)ci inchoatives are decomposed into two degree phrases. Furthermore, the -(e)ci morpheme is assumed to be the realization of a typical functional degree head. (University of Delaware)
Keywords Korean, inchoatives, degree phrase, gradable predicates, measure of change function, (e)ci
1. Introduction
1.1 Scalar analysis of adjectives
A number of studies have established semantic analysis of adjectives in English, using several different features (Kennedy and McNally 2005; Yoon 1996). Kennedy and McNally (2005) specifically applied scales such as finiteness, density, minimal or maximal elements, endpoints, and so forth to the distinction of adjectives in terms of their semantic properties. Among those semantic dimensions, Rotstein and Winter (2004) claimed that the open/closed scale structure correlates with the total and partial predicates identified by Yoon (1996).
(1) Absolute adjective
a. Total adjective
e.g. full, flat, closed, straight, clean
b. Partial adjective
e.g. awake, visible, open, bent, dirty
(2) Relative adjective
e.g. tall, interesting, large, energetic (Kennedy and McNally 2005)
These total and partial predicates illustrated in (1) are known to have absolute endpoints, so called absolute predicates such that total predicates have a maximal degree of their own properties and partial predicates has some degree, at least non-zero degree of their properties. For instance, a total adjective like clean in (1a) has a maximum standard of cleanliness, while a partial adjective like dirty...