• Language and Information
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.103-117
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• 2015

Not fully satisfied with the treatment of the so-called two nows in Korean by Lee & Choi (2009), this article seeks to furnish the issue with a firmer ground to base on in the relevant conversation. A close comparison between now and cikum appearing in the present perfect and present tense results in the two findings that (i) a crucial difference between the two adverbs is that Korean cikum lacks English now's ability to be identified with the reference time and (ii) further, seeming differences between them are not real but in fact due to tense and aspectual discrepancies between English and Korean. Thus, it claims, contra Lee (1976) and Park (2004), that cikum is a temporal locating adverb which invariably locates the event time of a given eventuality at the utterance time. In particular, it motivates that a past-tensed sentence with cikum should be understood as holding in the recent past mainly from pragmatic inferences rather than semantic entailments.