한국언어과학회

This paper explores the comparison of the characteristics of object-dominant English and action-dominant Korean counterparts. In this paper it is claimed that English as the object-dominant language and Korean as the action-dominant language show the following five linguistic features. The first concerns the plural markings. The plural inflections in English nouns depend on the inherent plurality of entities or objects involved, while the plural marking –tul in Korean typically shows context-dependency in the given event. The marking –tul typically requires the distributive reading of entities or plural events in the given context. The second concerns the modification structures for head nouns. The head nouns in the noun phrases in English may take the complex structures of modification for noun phrases(NP) which include pre- and post-modifications, while the those in the NPs in Korean usually take only the simple pre-modification. The third concerns English light verb construction, in which the action nouns take main verbal lexical contents, while Korean counterparts have a relatively limited usage of the construction and undergo the easy process of verbalization. The fourth concerns stative ‘be+prepositional phrase’ combinations in English, which often convey the dynamic meanings, while the dynamic equivalent in Korean should express the relevant verbs for the event. Finally, the fifth one concerns the conflation of English motion verbs, while Korean motion verbs are not conflated but realized as servial verbs. All the five features are argued to serve to indicate the object vs. action dominance of each language.