• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.39
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• pp.329-354
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• 2015

The major goals of this paper are to identify the degree into which the meanings of 'see' verb can be extended, focusing on the extended meanings shown in the expressions that denote our instinctive actions for survival, such as eating or drinking, etc., and to clarify the doubt on whether any syntactic pattern can be associated with the meaning in the process of meaning extension of 'see' verb. For doing this task, this paper picked out 2,000 examples randomly from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), in which the verb 'see' is used. This paper classified the sentences into thirteen different sentence types, according to the syntactic patterns. This research showed that these thirteen syntactic types lead us to figure out the process of the meaning extension of the verb 'see'. With this result, this paper made an attempt to provide the four steps toward the meaning extension of verb 'see'. The verb 'see' in the first step denotes the meaning of purely seeing the visualized objects. This verb in the second step expresses the shifted function, under which the agent in the subject position takes the seeing action as a secondary task in order to carry out other main task. The verb in the third step denotes the extended meanings irrelevant to the seeing action, because the sentences on this step do not contain any visualized objects. In the last step this verb functions as conventional implicature whose meaning does not contribute to the whole meaning of a sentence. In addition, this paper identified that the syntactic properties are deeply associated with the process of meaning extension of the verb 'see', and tried to formalize this relationship between the syntax and semantics within the framework of Construction Grammar based on A. Goldberg.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.41-49
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• 2017

In this paper I applies Borer (1993)'s way of classifying English intransitive action verbs such as 'run', walk, among many others, to the corresponding Korean intransitive action verbs such as 'tali-ta' and 'keət-ta', and show how they are different from - or similar with - each other in terms of syntactic structures and verb classification. Unlike the English verb 'run' which can be classified into an unaccusative verb as well as an unergative verb in Borer's theory, the corresponding Korean verbs 'tali-ta' or 't'wi-ta' can behave not only as an unergative and unauucsative verb, but also it can behave as a transitive verb. Though Borer's perspective on classification of verb types may be thought of as somewhat radical mostly due to its heavy dependency on aspectual representation of a whole sentence which a verb is just part of, it is clearly suggesting a new and great insight into the controversial topic of classification of verb types. So it is worth adopting this insightful perspective for the analysis of corresponding Korean verbs and seeing if it also works for the Korean ones.