형용사 논항 의미부류 표준화를 위한 기초 연구 - '크다, 작다, 많다, 적다'를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper aims at establishing standard usages of Korean adjectival predicates khu-/cak- ‘big/small’ and manh-/cek- ‘many/few’ based on their syntactic and semantic behavior. The paper focuses on the proper/improper combination of subject and the adjectives, in other words, their semantic/syntactic selection of the subject argument. In order to get an objective and generalized result, we collected data from a large corpus built by National Academy of the Korean Language (2002), which includes a variety of written/spoken texts of contemporary Korean. First, we argue that the four adjectives should be analyzed as one-place predicates, and thus we are interested in the semantic classes of their subject argument in particular. We examined the previous semantic descriptions of three main dictionaries of Korean, and reinterpreted them in terms of semantic classes of subject nominals. On the other hand, we classified the noun classes of subject arguments collected from the large corpus, so to illustrate a comparison between the previous descriptions and the actual uses of the adjectives. The data from the corpus show that the adjectives khu-/cak‘big’/‘small’ semantically select a subject noun in terms of ‘size, magnitude, volume’, whereas manh- ‘many’ and cek- ‘few’ select it in terms of ‘quantity, amount.’ The denotation of the subject nominal extends from the concrete domain to the abstract domain, whose semantic classification is given under [Table 2 and 3]. The tables suggest that the adjectives do not have many distinct senses but their polysemous readings derive from the different semantic types of subject nouns. The paper also notes asymmetric behaviors of khu- and cak- on the one hand and manh- ‘many’ and cek- ‘few’ on the other. That is, khu- and cakdo not exactly share the same classes of subject nominals, and further they may select different nominals in its predicative uses and its adnominal uses. We noted that this last asymmetry between the adnominal and the predicative uses can be accounted in terms of degree of frozenness