형태소 개념과 국어사 기술

Abstract

The Concept of the Morpheme and the Description on the History of the Korean Language Morphs which are allomorphs of a morpheme have a complementary distribution or an exclusive distribution. It is known that the terms of a complementary distribution or a exclusive distribution have the same meaning in synchroninic linguistics. But the meaning of the two terms are not equal conceptually. Exactly a complementary distribution refers to the follows; in units consisting of more than one alternant, the total distribution of all the alternants equals the range of environments in which some unit with only a single alternant occurs. And an exclusive distribution refers to the follows; no one of two or more alternants ever occurs in the same environment as the other. When all the alternants are in a stable state synchronically, it is said that a complementary distribution and an exclusive distribution have the same meaning because they have the same denotation. However when all the alternants are in the process of historical change, a complementary distribution and an exclusive distribution must be distinguished respectively. For example, the postposition of nominative case '이' and '가' is in a complementary distribution and an exclusive distribution at the same time in modern Korean. But while the new form '가' emerged and encroached on the territory of the old form '이', the two forms '이' and '가' was in a complementary distribution but not in an exclusive distribution diachronically. The notion that a complementary distribution are different from an exclusive distribution diachronically can explain many other phenomena of the history of Korean language such as '　' and '는', '-았-' and '-었-', '니르-' and '니를-', etc.