The Implicational Meaning and Prosody of Conjunctive Marker '-ko' in Korean

한국어 대등적 연결어미 '-고'의 함축 의미와 운율

The conjunctive marker '-ko' in Korean can be interpreted as meaning either conjunctive 'and' or ordering 'and then'. The interpretation of '-ko' is ambiguous in written texts but not in spoken texts. It is because the meaning of the utterance is determined by the combination of the text with its prosody. The two meanings of ' -ko' can be explained by the theory of implicature, which was introduced by Grice (1973, 1981). This paper examines the meaning of the marker '-ko' with respect to the relation between its meaning and prosody. The results of the experiments in this paper showed that the prosodic phrasing in Korean influences the interpretation of the marker '-ko'. When two constituents combined by '-ko' are realized in the same accentual phrase, the marker can be interpreted as meaning 'exactly be orderly'. This meaning can be classified as the Particularlized Conversational Implicature (PCl) in Gricean theory. In the other cases of phrasing, the marker '-ko' can mean either 'conjunctive' or 'be orderly' by the Generalized Conversational Implicature (GCI). The fact that phrasing determines the interpretations of the marker '-ko' can be seen as supporting the view that prosody interacts with various levels of linguistic phenomena from phonology to pragmatics.