Quantities, Degrees, and Possible Worlds - Lexical Semantics of Korean Adverb '거의(geoui)'

양(quantity), 정도(degree), 가능세계 - 부사 '거의'의 어휘의미를 중심으로 -

A Korean adverb '거의(geoui)' modifies predicates to generate complex predicates which have meanings of 'nearly' complete or typical properties of the modified predicates in quantities, degrees, and frequencies. The modified predicates 'complete' or 'typical' properties are referred counterfactually as standards for the generated predicates' meanings of deficiencies. These counterfactual standards can be formalized by a counterfactual conditional operator of the intensional semantics in Cresswell(1990). The deficiencies in the quantities, degrees, or frequencies of the properties can be expressed formally introducing a world-independent measure of comparison. The measure can be manufactured out of relations between intensional things at indices and their equivalence classes. The world-independent measure of comparison has a semantic structure under-specified in quantity, degree, and frequency, and seems very well-suited in describing lexical meaning of '거의(geoui)'. The lexical-semantic analysis of '거의(geoui)' shows explicitly the plausibility of the indispensable existence of the comparing measure which works across real and counterfactual worlds in natural language meaning. On the other hand, we examined Kim, young-hee(1985)'s proposal of a transition of quantificational meaning for Korean degree adverbs, where he tried to explain the quantificational meaning of Korean degree adverbs in general including '거의(geoui)' with several syntactic and semantic constraints of 'contextual deletion'. But it is shown that the quantificational meanings of the degree adverbs which Kim(1985) discussed are also explained better by their under-specified meanings in quantities, frequencies and degrees with the world-independent measure of comparison applied to their paradigmatic lexical constraint rather than Kim(1985)'s transition of meaning.