• Korean Linguistics
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• v.74
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• pp.1-24
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• 2017

This paper investigated -eullanjira sentence as a kind of construction of the Southwestern dialect in Korea. Five informants were selected to form the main corpus of -eullanjira. Through analyzing the corpus, its semantic, syntactic and morphological characteristics were figured out. Firstly, a view of construction grammar was adopted to capture the semantic and syntactic characteristics of -eullanjira. The construction of -eullanjira was established as "Xdo Yeullanjira Z". Syntactically, -do was found to be a common auxiliary particle, which allowed nouns, adverbs, verbs and adjectives to appear at the position of X, while only verbs and adjectives could appear at the position of Y. Subject-honorific, causative and passive prefinal endings could coexist with Y, while tense and modal prefinal endings could not. Z was an embedded clause, which had the semantic feature of [-DOUBT], meaning 'it should be done undoubtedly'. The formation of -eullanjira was next examined both diachronically and synchronically. It was found there was a conjuntive ending of Middle Korean, corresponding -eullanjira, namely, -landai. Finally, -eullanjira was newly analyzed as [[-eulla-]+[-n-ji-ra]].