부사 ‘그렇게’의 극성 연구

Abstract

The purpose of current study is to identify the semantic-o-pragmatic role of Korean adverb kulehkey ‘so/very/that much.’Korean Journal of Linguistics, Thus far, the role of kulehkey has been treated as a polysemy between strong NPI and degree adverb. Given the set of empirical data, however, our novel claim is that the function of kulehkey can be unified under the single role of NPI(strong/weak). Following the framework of the scalar principle and scalar model theory, we show that weak NPI kulehkey functions as an emphatic scalar intensifier whereas strong NPI kulehkey as an attenuating NPI. As an intensifier, kulehkey emphasizes the speaker’s attitude that can be characterized as involving a high scalarity of the speaker’s commitment to the proposition. Our claim will be further supported by corpus study. Theoretical implication of current study is to provide the widened view of crosslinguistic variation to cases where language parameterize the semantics and pragmatics of their non-degreeable and rhetoric scalar reasoning.