한국언어과학회

This paper investigates the semantic and pragmatic consequences of the adverbial nature carried by floating quantifiers in Korean. It is assumed in this paper that floating quantifiers in Korean carry the adverbial nature rather than the stranding one which relates the floating quantifiers with their head nouns in syntactic analysis. The adverbial nature of Korean floating quantifiers produces some semantic and pragmatic consequences. In other words, the adverbials in Korean often contribute to the production of semantic ambiguities and pragmatic ‘focus’ and ‘presentative’ function in the sentence information structures. The semantic consequences relate to the semantic ambiguity caused by floating quantifiers. The use of floating quantifiers causes the preferences for the partitive and/or distributive reading rather than exhaustive and/or collective reading, respectively. The pragmatic consequences of Korean floating quantifiers, however, relate to focus and presentative function. The focus function of floating quantifiers in Korean derives from preverbal focus universal hypothesis(Kim, 1985) in that the floating quantifiers stand close to verbs in the sentence-final position. The presentative function of floating quantifiers in turn derives from their usual preverbal positionings and their resultant focus status.