합성어의 형성 원리— ‘선술’형, ‘섞어찌개’형 합성어를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper examines word-formation rules of Korean compounds composed of a verb and a noun. In a V-N or N-V compound, the noun usually corresponds to the verb’s argument or adjunct. It has been pointed out in previous studies that ‘subject + transitive verb’ compounds are hardly (if not impossible) allowed in synthetic compounds or N-V compound verbs, while ‘subject/adjunct + intransitive’ or ‘object/adjunct + transitive’ compounds are often found. This paper claims that such restriction is not limited to synthetic compounds or N-V compound verbs but is a general restriction that applies to all types of V-N or N-V compounds in Korean. There are, however, two types of V-N compounds in Korean whose noun components are not in the relation of argument or adjunct to the verb components: senswul-type and sekkeccikae-type compounds. In both types of compounds, we cannot establish an argument or adjunct relationship between the verb and the noun. It seems that they are not constituents of the same clause but belong to two separate clauses in their syntactic and semantic counterparts. The verb is the predicate of the first clause and the noun is the object argument of the second clause. The verb component of senswul-type compounds is always intransitive and takes the adnominal suffix ‘-(u)n’, whereas that of sekkeccikae-type compounds can be either transitive or intransitive and takes the connective suffix –e or -(e)se. Such combination of a verb and a noun is not possible in a syntactic construction. Their existence clearly shows that morphological structures and rules are different from syntactic ones in Korean.