한국언어과학회

This paper explores the semantic asymmetry in the antonymous pairs of Korean spatial terms in terms of the unmarkedness notion. The semantic asymmetries in the antonymous pairs of positional spatial terms are discussed in terms of the degree in meaning extensions of the individual terms according to the unmarkedness of the terms. The following claims are made in this paper. First, the semantic asymmetry in terms of the degree of meaning extension differs according to the horizontal and vertical dimension of the spatial terms. The spatial term ‘wi(top)’ in the vertical dimension shows the wider range of meaning extension than the antonymous spatial terms ‘arae(bottom)’ in the meaning. The asymmetric tendency of the antonymous pair in the vertical dimension is also preserved in the semantic combination of compound nouns. The same asymmetry from the unmarkedness effect is not true of the spatial terms in the horizontal dimension in that the spatial term ‘ap(front)’ in the horizontal dimension shows the similar range of meaning extension to ‘tui(back)’ and does not display the unmarkedness effect from bodily experience and semantic asymmetry. Furthermore the asymmetric tendency from the unmarkedness effect in the horizontal dimension is not shown in the semantic combination of compound nouns, either. Second, the positive rather than negative value terms in space-related dimensional adjectives indicate the unmarked properties in terms of the cognitive saliency and serve as the typical source of stems for their nouns for property marking. The unmarkedness of positive value terms in cognitive saliency is argued to lead to the more power of meaning extension. The antonymous dimensional adjectives in the pairs are claimed to show the different ranges of uses and meaning extensions due to the unmarkedness effect.