국어 감정 어휘의 습득

Abstract

This study investigates the early acquisition pattern of affect lexicon in three Korean-speaking children (1;7-2;4) and their primary caretakers. Results are compared with findings from a previous cross-sectional study on the acquisition of affect words in Korean, and also with acquisition patterns of affect lexicon in English, Samoan, and Japanese. Data indicate that Korean-speaking children begin to produce affect predicates that are typically used in double-nominative constructions very early and frequently. There are three major types of such affect predicates: 1. predicates that can ambiguously express the experiencer's subjective experience or the theme's objective attributes; 2. predicates that express physical sensations or physiological needs; 3. metaphorical affect predicates. Early acquisition data reveal how pervasively and precociously double-nominative constructions appear in Korean child-adult interactions. This construction seems to enable at least some Korean-speaking children to acquire metaphorical affect predicates before age 2, depending on its occurrence in the input. While the subjects in this study began to produce evaluative affect predicates such as coh- 'be likable' and silh- 'be dislikable' very early, they did not produce prototypical emotion predicates such as kippu- 'be happy' and sulphu- 'be sad' during this period of investigation. It is suggested that the early production of evaluative affect predicates as well as those expressing physical sensations/physiological needs in many languages might be developmentally motivated by organismic survival needs. It is also proposed that the ambiguity of affect predicates in Korean double-nominative constructions might be a manifestation of human experience in which there is no absolute distinction between objectivity and subjectivity.