‘-었-’의 중의성

Abstract

In this study I claim that -ess in Korean is ambiguous between a past tense marker and a perfect marker. This is against the general directions of studies about the morpheme. Most studies assume one of them as semantic meaning and try to explain the other pragmatically. In this paper, I support the ambiguity view on the basis of some semantic and syntactic evidence. First, the two have different truth-conditions. Second, when the morpheme has perfect meaning, the past event is a presupposition, which is not pragmatically inferred but inherent to the semantic meaning itself. Some perfect uses of the morpheme give rise to individual-level predicates, which is a semantic process, not a pragmatic process of inferring from a past event. And the existence of the expression -ess-ess in Korean shows that there are two positions for -ess. Finally, tense and aspect take two different syntactic positions, which is motivated for appropriate semantic interpretation. This leads to different interpretations of time expressions, depending on their syntactic positions.