성격 형용사의 어휘사-근대국어와 현대국어의 차이와 변화경향을 중심으로-

Abstract

’Character’ means an inherent nature or personality possessed by a person and the characteristic adjective is defined as the expression of such a tendency through adjectives. The Korean characteristic adjectives, which were examined through modern & contemporary Korean materials, assume the characteristics as follows: First, the modern Korean characteristic adjectives were found to have the vocabulary expressing ethical aspect the most, followed by the word expressing the attitude towards others, and the vocabulary expressing intellectual aspects was found to be the least. In addition, the word expressing affirmative aspects were found to be more specialized than the word for negative aspects. Nevertheless, this study found that the characteristic adjectives of the contemporary Korean language were characterized by the fact that they came to have a lot more adjectives having a negative meaning in comparison with the modern Korean language. Second, this study could classify the change pattern of characteristic adjectives as ‘extinction of a word itself, semantic reduction, semantic extension, the vocabulary once belonging to a different category, which made access to a characteristic adjective, and generation of a new vocabulary’, etc. This study found that there were many cases of word extinction from the hybrid word having native tongue and one-syllable Chinese character root; in addition, in case of native tongue, it became extinct when it formed the similar tenor relations with two-syllable Chinese character root hybrid words. This study found that when the one-syllable Chinese character hybrid words formed the similar tenor relations with the native tongue, only the native tongue survived and they ceased to exist. In case of the absence of the synonym to native tongue, there was an aspect that the one-syllable Chinese character root hybrid words were inherited through the transformation into a two-syllable Chinese character root.