A Comparative Study on the Aspectual Classification of Korean and Japanese Verbs in Relation to ‘-ess-’ ‘-essess-’ in Korean and ‘sudeni’in Japanese

A Comparative Study on the Aspectual Classification of Korean and Japanese Verbs in Relation to ‘-ess-’ ‘-essess-’ in Korean and ‘sudeni’ in Japanese Younghee Lee and Byong-Rae Ryu Department of Linguistics, Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Korea younghlee@hanmir.com, ryu@cnu.ac.kr Abstract. This paper deals with an aspectual classification of Korean and Japanese verbs based on Vendler (1967). Both of Korean and Japanese verbs are classified into 12 distinctive aspectual categories by their restrictions on time adverbials, progressive tenses and logical entailments. A well-established aspectual verb classes provide us not only with a better understanding of both languages, but also with an explicit explanation concerning some grammatical phenomena relevant to time. The aspectual classes of Korean verbs clarify the ambiguous semantic functions of so called Korean tense forms ‘-ess-‘ and ‘-essess-‘, while those of Japanese verbs elucidate the semantic functions of ‘sudeni’, the equivalent of ‘already’ in English, when it occurs with a variety of verbs in sentences. Keywords: aktionsarten, temporal properties, internal temporal structure, telicity, resultative 1 Introduction This paper presents an aspectual classification of Korean and Japanese verbs in terms of the temporal properties which are considered inherent in the lexical meanings of the verbs, and also shows that the aspectual verbal classes provide an explicit explanation for some time relevant linguistic phenomena. We classify Korean and Japanese verbs into 12 distinct aspectual classes respectively on the basis of Vendler (1967). The temporal characteristics of the Korean verbs are closely related to a variety of the interpretations of the Korean past tense forms ‘-ess-‘ and ‘-essess-‘ which have been controversial, and also the semantic distinctions of ‘te iru’ form of Japanese verbs combined with ‘sudeni’ result from the internal time structure of the verbs. Of the temporal properties inherent in the verbs, telicity1 plays a significant role in relation to linguistic phenomena. Tense and aspect are concerned with time, but in different ways. Tense is a deictic category which locates a situation in time, while aspect is a non-deictic category which is a different way of viewing the internal constituency of a situation (Comrie,1976). Two different definitions of aspect are given, i.e. one is the aspectual classes of verbs and the other is the aspectual forms of verbs. The first is called aktionsarten and the second is what are called the progressive, perfect, and resultative which the verbs show when combined with aspect markers. The verbs which have the same internal temporal structure form a certain aspectual class and the verbal behaviors of each aspectual class are differentiated syntactically and semantically. 2 Vendler’s Classification of Verbs Vendler classified English verbs into four aspectual classes by means of their compatibility with the three time adverbials, i.e. for-time interval, in-time interval, at-point of time; the possibility of progressive form and logical entailments. He distinguished states, activities, accomplishments and achievements. States lack the progressive form and co-occur with time adverbial ‘for-phrase’ which 1 Telicity means some verbs necessarily involve an end or goal in a way that other verbs don’t. PACLIC 24 Proceedings 471 …

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