• Language and Information
• /
• v.18 no.1
• /
• pp.1-32
• /
• 2014

This paper provides a corpus study on subjunctives in Korean in a way of comparative semantics. The whole arguments of this paper are bolstered by distributional evidence taken from naturally occurring bitexts (i.e. a bilingual corpus), in which one sentence in a language is aligned with one translation in the other language. Since previous studies regard past tense morphology as the main component to express irrealis and uncertainty, this paper accordingly checks out whether the past tense morpheme (e/a)ss in Korean is also responsible for conveying the meaning of subjunctives. My finding is that the past tense morpheme (e/a)ss is a sufficient condition for forming subjunctives in Korean. The current corpus study verifies that the past tense morpheme is not obligatorily used in present conditional counterfactuals in Korean, unlike English. Yet, if (e/a)ss is used and the antecedent denotes a present situation, the conditional sentence can only be interpreted as conveying counterfactuality. On the other hand, wish constructions in Korean, irrespective of the semantic tense, often contain the past tense morpheme. Hence, this work substantiates Iatridou (2000)'s theory of 'fake past tense' is applicable to Korean subjunctives. The present corpus study, additionally, reveals that a conditional marker telamyen is a component of expressing past counterfactuals in Korean.

• Language and Information
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.93-105
• /
• 2000

I argue in this paper that the sequence of tense (SOT) phenomenon can be accounted for without positing a SOT rule, focusing on the contrast between the past under-past sentences which lead to ambiguity and those sentences which do not. The different interpreta- tion of past under past sentences depends on whether the stative or then non-stative predicates occur in the complement clauses in the propositional attitude verbs. Based on this, I also argue that the embedded past tense does not contribute to the seman- tics past tense in the complement clause. Instead, it is due to the occurrence of the stative or non-stative predicates in the complement clauses. The stative predicates are associated with the temporal precedence or the overlap relation, whereas the non-stative predicates the precedence relation only. This fact triggers the contrast in past- under- past sentences.(Korea University)

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.177-191
• /
• 2011

This paper examines nursing professionals' English abstract to learn their preferences towards tense and voice choices. A total of 24 abstracts, completed reviews to be published by the editorial board members of the Korea Industrial Nursing Association, were analyzed for the study. Each sentence in the four parts of the abstract (Purpose, Methods, Results, and Conclusion) was examined and classified into active/passive voices, and present/past/present perfect tenses. Verbs were then further identified to see which ones were commonly preferred to state the objectives of the study, methods, and to draw conclusions. Hedging expressions in Conclusion were also examined. The results of the present study revealed that Purpose was mostly (79%) stated in the past tense with slight use (17%) of the present tense in the form of 58% active and 42% passive voice whereas Methods were dominantly (96%) illustrated in the past tense with preference of mixed active and passive voice. The Results were also preferably (92%) stated in past tense and Conclusion in both present and past tense. Verbs used by these nursing professionals seemed diverse; however, hedging appeared to be narrowly limited to a few expressions including suggest and should. More diverse English hedging expressions need to be taught at least college level writing so that the EFL learners and writers can have a better understanding of presenting statements in an appropriate level of caution, confidence, or uncertainty.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.6 no.2
• /
• pp.123-131
• /
• 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate the comprehension and production of various tense markings in Korean-speaking children with and without language delay. Thirty children with language delay(LD) and 30 typically developing(TD) children participated in the study. In each group, half were at the age of 4-years and the other half at 7-years. In both the comprehension and production task, 28 verbs containing four types of tense markings were used: past tense '-et ta', two present progressives '-ko itta', '-enta', and future tense '-elyeko hanta'. In the comprehension task, the children were presented with three printed still-scenes of video recording of a verb action, each representing future, present progressive, and past tense of the verb, respectively. Then they listened to the action verb with one of the 4 tense markings and had to pick the scene that matched the verb tense. In the production task, the children were given one of the three scenes and asked to produce the verb with appropriate tense marking. In both tasks, the LD children performed significantly worse than the TD children, and the older children performed significantly better than the younger children. Interestingly, the pattern of performances across different types of tense markings at the two language-age levels were closely similar in LD children and TD children. This similarity of groups seemed stronger in the comprehension task than the production task.

• Language and Information
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.27-40
• /
• 2000

The purpose of this paper is to propose a way of analyzing English embedded tense in terms of temporal per- spective time. To this end, the notion of temporal perspective time and Cooper and Ginzburg's(1996) attitude account are employed. Temporal perspective time is used to define the tense and to capture the anaphoric property of embedded tense,: the embedded temporal perspective time draws the embedding event time by anaphora. The ambiguity in the sequence of tense construction is described in terms of the attitude tense constraint reflecting the anaphoric property and two definitions of the past tense. The double access property in the present-under-past construction is described in terms of the constraint, the notion of eventuality, and the situation theoretic existential quantifier.

• Language and Information
• /
• v.3 no.1
• /
• pp.1-20
• /
• 1999

The purpose of this paper is to expand Stowell (1993), Stowell (1995), Stowell (1996)'s syntactic analysis of tense in English. Stowell treats Tense as a dyadic predicate of temporal ordering which takes those two time-denoting phrases as its arguments. He further argues that those two morphemes 'resent' and 'past' are polarity-sensitive elements encoding an LF-scope relation with respect to true PAST tense. This paper proposes that English future 'will' should be treated as a true tense and that its future morpheme is an anti-PAST polarity item. It also provides a syntactic interpretation of a peculiar morphological aspect of English that it has no future form of the verb. To this end, Stowell's analysis is incorporated into the Minimalist program of Chomsky(1995). It is proposed that, unlike in other languages like French and Spanish, FUTURE in English is of an affix. This provides an intuitively correct description of why English verbs do not have a future form like other languages. The last but not least point which this paper will discuss is that Ogihara (1995a)'s claim that the referential theory of tensed sentences is inadequate is untenable.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.183-195
• /
• 2005

In the present study, we investigated development of verb inflections or endings in 3- to 5-year old Korean-speaking children using 28 action verbs for both comprehension and production tasks. For each verb, a l0-second long motion picture and a sheet of paper with three random-ordered color pictures representing 'before, in the middle of, at the end of' the action were generated. A past tense inflection' -et ta,' two present progressive verb endings '-enta' & '-ko itta.' a future tense ending '-elyeko hanta' were tested. In the comprehension task, children were asked to point to a picture correctly representing the tense of a presented verb. In the production task, children were asked to produce a verb with correctly marking the tense of a presented picture. The order of the two tasks were counterbalanced across the children, and the motion pictures were only presented in the first task. Across the ages, the performance accuracies on both comprehension and production tasks were the highest for the past tense marking followed by two present progressive and future tense markings. For each verb endings, the changes of accuracies across ages were analyzed in both tasks. The types of errors for production tasks were also reported.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.13 no.3
• /
• pp.133-156
• /
• 2007

Although the understanding of English tense system is a crucial factor for communicative English learning and teaching for EFL students, it has been neglected over the years. As with other areas of the grammar, difficulties may arise from the nature of the system itself or from differences between time, tense and aspect. Consequently, many learners face a considerable difficulty with the English tense system as they are more often unable to grasp the basic conceptual differences of present/present continuous, past/present perfect, will/be going to along with many others. More concerning fact is that lots of instructors or so-called native English teachers seem not to be aware of the importance of teaching English tense system. The purpose of this study is to review and examine various theories and practical usages of tense in order to establish and/or present better methods for teaching tenses. This paper is focused on comparatively exact distinction of time, physical notion from tense, grammatical category as well as sequences of tenses in view of school grammar and communicative function. At the end or middle of each chapter, efficient teaching and learning techniques or strategies on tenses are suggested to help instructors or learners who relentlessly face confusions in understanding tense and its usage for communicative English learning and teaching. This study attempts to influence learners' ability to recognize and write tense in authentic contexts not to mention spoken English.

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

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.42
• /
• pp.451-474
• /
• 2016

Analysis of the syntactic structure of the modern Chinese adverbs for time 'Cengjing (曾經)' and 'Yijing (已經)' was performed to examine the tenses and aspects of the terms. The corresponding Korean words were examined and the terms in both languages were compared. The syntactic structures used in China and South Korea were found to be different. We hope the study of the Chinese language will help Korean students. 'Cengjing (曾經)' specific projects with 'aspect' of, 'Past experience aspect', 'Past continuous aspect', 'Past continuous aspect' in the past tense. [ED: unclear, please reword] These correspond to '_었 (았)_', '_었었_' in the Korean language. 'Yijing (已經)' has 'finished phase' of concrete projects, 'Past experience aspect', 'Past continuous aspect', also has a specific project tense, the 'past tense', 'present tense', 'future tense', and so tense. [ED: unclear, please reword] Adjectives can also be modified with a 'change of status'. These correspond to '_었 (았)_', '_고_', '_었었_', '곧' etc. in Korean. 'Cengjing (曾經)' and the dynamic auxiliary 'Guo (過)' were compared to determine whether they have the aspect and tense features. However, 'Guo (過)' can only modify the predicate verb, so it possesses only aspect characteristics. 'Cengjing (曾經)' modifies the range more widely. 'Yijing (已經)' may be modified by the adverb 'Zai (在)' whereas 'Cengjing (曾經)' may not. Additionally, 'Yijing (已經)' can be modified by predicate adjectives and noun predicates, while 'Cengjing (曾經)' cannot.