지시어 ‘이, 그, 저’의 용법과 의미

Abstract

Kang, Chang-Seok. 2016. The Usage of Korean Demonstratives ‘i, geu, jeo’. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 41-2, 201-216. The demonstratives in Korean (‘i, geu, jeo’) show high token frequency in the daily conversation and written texts, which makes it an important task to understand their usages and to describe them exactly and explicitly. In order to properly grasp the usage of ‘i, geu, jeo’, one should recognize some fundamental features of Korean, among which the two features of 'language that fully utilizes discourse context' and 'language with a sophisticated system of honorifics' are emphasized in this article. It is maintained here that these features are of vital impotance for their usages. The demonstratives in Korean have been described in terms of spatial contrast of 'close-remote', as shown in terms like 'close reference' and 'remote reference'. However, the author's analysis of empirical data suggests that the distinction between these demonstratives should not be described in terms of spatial contrast. The main points are made in the paper as follows: First, ‘i’ and ‘jeo’ are under complementary opposition; the former refers to a domain that the speaker establishes with respect to himself, while the latter, to the domain that is outside the former domain. ‘geu’ is complementary to neither ‘i’ nor ‘jeo’; it is used when the speaker refers to an entity that the hearer has already known. It is not the case, though, that ‘그’ is used whenever the entity is already known to the hearer. Specifically, In the discourse situation of 'the speaker-the hearer' contrast, the speaker uses ‘그’ when s/he speaks not from his/her perspective, but from the hearer's perspective. (Chungbuk National University)