'Because of Doing' and 'Because of Happening': A Corpus-based Analysis of Korean Causal Conjunctives, -nula(ko) and -nun palamey

  • Oh, Sang-Suk (Dept. of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University)
  • Published : 2004.12.31

Abstract

the two Korean causal conjunctive suffixes, -nula(ko) and -nun palamey, based on corpus linguistic analysis. Many of the linguistic accounts available, both in pedagogical reference and in the literature on linguistics, provide incomplete analyses of these suffixes, based on fabricated linguistic data. Using naturally occurring, real linguistic data, this paper examines the syntactic and semantic structures of the two causal suffixes through a consideration of three areas of corpus linguistic analysis: token frequencies, collocations, and semantic prosody. An analysis based on concordance data reveals that the two causal connectives, -nula(ko) and -nun palamey, have more differences than similarities in terms of syntactic and semantic constraints. The idiosyncratic structures of the two suffixes are discussed in terms of same subject condition, verb selection, same agent condition, synchronicity condition, and negative semantic prosody.

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