• International journal of advanced smart convergence
• /
• v.6 no.4
• /
• pp.41-49
• /
• 2017

In this paper I applies Borer (1993)'s way of classifying English intransitive action verbs such as 'run', walk, among many others, to the corresponding Korean intransitive action verbs such as 'tali-ta' and 'keət-ta', and show how they are different from - or similar with - each other in terms of syntactic structures and verb classification. Unlike the English verb 'run' which can be classified into an unaccusative verb as well as an unergative verb in Borer's theory, the corresponding Korean verbs 'tali-ta' or 't'wi-ta' can behave not only as an unergative and unauucsative verb, but also it can behave as a transitive verb. Though Borer's perspective on classification of verb types may be thought of as somewhat radical mostly due to its heavy dependency on aspectual representation of a whole sentence which a verb is just part of, it is clearly suggesting a new and great insight into the controversial topic of classification of verb types. So it is worth adopting this insightful perspective for the analysis of corresponding Korean verbs and seeing if it also works for the Korean ones.