단어를 다시 정의해야 하는 시급한 이유들

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is, first, to point out the fact that there is a considerable amount of disagreement between scholar’s definition about word in Korean and the general public’s understanding about word, who are engaged in Korean language teaching in general, and second to try to theoretically revise the definition of word on a realistic basis. To put concretely, this paper claims that the current 9 parts-of-speech system must be revised on the grounds of ones as follows. First, the current 9 parts-of-speech are chosen based on misguided word functions. Second, there are no clear-cut standpoints available about the basic syntactic unit. The morphological criterion such as the minimal meaningful unit can no longer hold itself for the syntactic criterion. Syntactic criterion must be chosen strictly only by syntactic functions, not by morphological units. Third, phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, orthographic, and vocabulary words are all different. They are not interchangeable. Fourth, in a language like Korean being one of agglutinative language, the vocabulary word and syntactic word corresponds one to one in principle. Therefore, the existence of inflectional suffixes in Korean cannot be approved, which can only be approved on the ground of not being in correspondence between vocabulary and syntactic word. Fifth, the so called conjugated body (e.g., mek-ess-ta) is not a syntactic word, but an orthographic word. And the orthographic word is not a member of syntactic units. Therefore, it is morphology where the orthographic words are formed not in syntax. Based on the aforementioned, I would claim that the current 9 parts-of-speech must be revised as follows; -the current 9 parts-of-speech: noun, pronoun, numeral, pre-noun, adverb, interjection, josa, verb, adjective -to be eliminated: pronoun, numeral, adjective -to be added: ending, idiom, collocation, light-verb-construction, temporary-word-construction, temporary-idiom-construction