중국어 ‘都’와 한국어 ‘다’의 비교 분석

Abstract

The present study represents an attempt to compare and contrast the Korean ‘ta’ and Chinese ‘dou’. This study finds out that while they have their own properties, both the words share some features in common. The findings are as follows: (1) Chinese ‘dou’ can occur between a plural subject and its predicate, resulting in universal quantification. Similarly, Korean ‘ta’ also functions as a universal quantifier; (2) Chinese ‘dou’ can quantify wh-words as well, but it seems that Korean ‘ta’ cannot; (3) Chinese ‘dou’ can function as a temporal adverb, referring to ‘already’ or ‘shortly’. Korean ‘ta’ has a similar function, but unlike Chinese ‘dou’, it can be used in an ironic sense, pretending that a given event has already occurred when the event in question cannot happen; (4) Finally, Chinese ‘dou’ with ‘lian’ can refer to ‘even’ and show speakers’ counterexpectation reading and it can have the same interpretation when used alone. Likewise, Korean ‘ta’ with ‘byeol’ has the similar interpretation and it also can be used alone for that interpretation. From these observations, it can be concluded that both the words have many things in common in terms of their syntactic environments, semantic properties, and pragmatic features.